> 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.
Please don't ask what my business is. I rather share true numbers, but don't link to my product. I see no upside in being super transparent about the financials in a non-anonymous way (although I enjoy transparency from others ;)).
What I think makes my product successful (and I keep this short, because luck plays an important role. Most startup stories suffer from survivorship and hindsight bias):
- It serves a niche and does so very well, better than all others. I have clearly defined my niche, although it took me years to exactly pinpoint it. There's a tendency to want to grab a "bigger audience". Since I make more money than I ever imagined, there is no need to grow bigger or reach a wider audience. This would also make the product less focused on the specific niche.
- Start working on something, release a prototype after 2-6 weeks. Don't invest months or years in something without users.
- For me, marketing = SEO. I never really got into social media. But I have to admit that nowadays, my SEO rankings dropped a bit and people talk about my product in Facebook groups.
- If there are two books I'd recommend: "Rework" by Basecamp. It helps you to focus on a minimal set of features and think about what's truly important. Couple this with "This is Marketing" from Seth Godin, where he explains how traditional marketing is dead and how it's important to find a niche. Don't read more books, interviews or whatever. Get into a "starter mindset" by reading and then do.
- The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). If your product is not used every day, but only once per month or so, expect way lower revenue.
The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits of my time I spend working, is priceless.
I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.
Here's a few things I do that made it "successful":
- Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing.
- Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere
- Having a good website that works, is well organized and easy to use.
- Friendly customer support, I like to talk to my customers as I would talk to a friend (to a certain extend).
- Fast shipping after receiving an order, or at least let the customer know when their order will be shipped.
- A good logo made by a designer, this has been super helpful for brand-awareness
- Good packaging that minimize most damage the plants, with printed plastic labels for each plants (with my logo on them)
- Active presence on social media, with good quality picture posts (with my logo on them)
- Always give more to the customer than what they expected to get. Even a small surprise when they open their package will make them feel good about their purchase.
- SEO optimisation so that people can find you on google. I struggle with this because google keeps autocorrecting my name.
Most of these points feel obvious to me, but I would say 95% of the other sellers fail at multiple of them. Mainly the customer support point, a lot of them feel like I'm talking to a robot.
I would say the part that I struggle the most with is staying on schedule and not forgetting about people who order via email/private message. Thankfully cold weather in the winter allow me to take a 6 months break each year. During that time I can relax and dive into other projets.
The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5/month Stripe plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends, posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It worked, then it didn't work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable.
About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they loved it, money wasn't an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be worth doing it properly.
It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (<$100 a phone). Each phone pays for itself in less than a month, server costs are less than $200 a month.
Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of running it, and it's been almost five years I think.
I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my competitors did — instead, I don't emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that let me survive this long.
I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers thinks they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me.
My monthly billings last month was 73k USD. I am a tax resident of a tax haven although I do live 3-6 months at a time in a different country.
The only advice I'd give anyone looking to build a lifestyle business is to keep your ambitions and by extension- product feature set in check. I know several other people who operate like me, and the common thread is we have businesses that can easily take VC funds, hire, and expand. But for lifestyle priorities, we chose not to.
A lot of people I've met (particularly in Chiang Mai, Thailand) copy popular, common, and easy online businesses such as drop shipping, social media XYZ, or coding. Unless you live in a really low cost area, it's not a good life. The key is have a very specific niche that can be scaled upwards if you want, but you always have the option not to. Those the ideas and businesses that seems to provide the ideal balance in lifestyle.
EDIT: The product came about at my last job where I built it to make my own job easier. Essentially it did 95% of what job which at the time enabled me to be the "best performer" while not actually working that hard.
Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.
The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough.
It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any questions you have.
It doesn't provide the majority of my income (yet) but by far and away it provides the majority of my life's meaning. I haven't crossed the mental hurdle of sharing all my numbers publicly yet but let's just say it is turning a profit and there are thousands of happy NanaGrammers.
I got started on it at my grandfather's 94th birthday party when by brother 1-uppped my gift of live lobsters with the gift of "InstaGrandpa." He prototyped it the night before and asked me to help build it.
Working solo is a challenge for many reasons. One thing I did early was automate the customer feedback loops. I set up an automated loop to collect customer reviews (https://nanagram.co/#happy). Collecting feedback from grandparents is a bit tougher so I set up a phone line for them to dial in and leave voicemails (https://nanagram.co/#happynanas). I get a couple voicemails and reviews each week and it's like maker fuel.
Another big challenge is fighting isolation. I like to practice deep work but there's a fine line between deep work and isolation. I would've given up a year ago if it weren't for the advisor-like support from my brother and my friend Dan. I did YC Startup School last summer and that was huge as well; I remember sharing with the group that I was on the edge of throwing in the towel, then last December MRR grew by over 2X. The next big thing I plan to change in my life is adding weekly volunteering.
It started out because a designer who sells fonts wanted to hire me to build a font previewer for their website so that customers could demo the fonts without being able to steal them. I quoted them the price and they said it was out of their price range. I said I would build it for free if they subscribed for a low monthly payment. They were ecstatic at the deal and invited their friends to sign up. Turned out it was an unsolved niche in the font design community. I posted it to a few websites where people were asking for a tool that does this. The rest is history.
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227
For anyone thinking it's egregiously difficult to start a solo-project: You're right, but if you stick with it your persistence will pay off. For solo-products, I think grit is the deciding factor between success and failure.
I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and stay very small, but I wasn't able to pull that off. I picked a niche that was too small, and I also didn't have the skills to execute very well (especially in marketing, sales, etc.), so growth has been quite slow. So I've exploring some new features that could increase the number of potential customers, and the new scope is going to be way too much work for one person, so I'm looking forward to building a small team of 5-10 people.
Earnest Capital has been really awesome, and I still think the SEAL is a good deal [3]. My experience has been similar to an accelerator program, but with a bit less pressure. I've had some really helpful calls with mentors, and the weekly update calls are also great for accountability. So I would recommend Earnest if you want to raise some money while building a sustainable company.
I have been living off the income this whole year. This is my bread and butter. I do not have a 9-5.
I launched the business with 4 listings in 2016. I live in New York. My main goal is building brand equity.
Business Model.
Private Seller
$199 to list
$299 to list with a social boost
Dealer: $99-list
I do not use cookies. No Tracking. No google adsense.
He's very generous with sharing his financials on his blog: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
Events are a good business to get into as a solo founder. You can book a venue, and you don't have to pay until a few weeks before the event. If you haven't sold any tickets you can just cancel the venue and walk away.
I started Agency Hackers in 2017 and I'm almost ready to quit my job and focus on it full time.
It took me two years to figure out that instead of selling individual tickets to events, I should offer a "membership" option where people can subscribe and just come to every event.
Since I started offering membership last month I've signed up 30 agencies – for a MRR of £4,500. Once I hit 50 I will quit my job.
To market the events, I don't run adverts or have much of a social presence. The only way I promote the events is via cold email - and an opt-in email list to customers. The cold email platform I use (Reply.io) did a case study on me if you're curious: [https://reply.io/case-study/agency-hackers/]
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-...
[2] https://park.io
Its just me, I'm a developer, which meant I could bootstrap the whole thing for zero cost (time not included) but I've always felt I knew I had what it takes to make a small business successful. Its an online service, we have a web site and apps in the app stores. I'd rather not say exactly what we do as this way I can be transparent on numbers. (Also, I am slightly paranoid of copy-cats) We have a paid for service, costs less than £50, its not a subscription, just a one off purchase. As has been said previously, luck plays a big part in success and I'm not going to pretend this is not true for me too.
-The competition are £MM businesses, and this is probably why I am able to be so successful as I can move faster, adapt, and resolve issues. Over time, people notice this. They tend to buy the customer via adwords.
-Word of mouth is a huge part of how the product has grown, people like the product and tell their friends/family, I spend less than £1500 p/m on advertising through the traditional online mediums.
- I always try new ideas out, and find out if people like them. Its low risk, low cost, high reward. Big fan of XP, agile, etc
- I'd recommend - Getting real (Basecamp) - https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real, its got some solid advice
- A mentality of always wanting to make the product better, without bloating it, is key.
- People always worry about support. It's really not a big deal, I've had hundreds of thousands of customers over the years, support contact is low.
Happy to answer any questions if people find it useful.
The idea for my product first came to me when a friend in university had trouble staying focused on writing papers. He was constantly playing World of Warcraft and needed a way to temporarily block himself from playing the game. So I quickly made a little VB.NET app and service that would watch for the game executable and kill the process if it starts. It did the job well enough and he ended up graduating :)
At that point, some other students approached me and asked for my little app to help them study. That's when, half-way through university (2010), I made a website for my app and had it available for free. I continued to maintain it and over 4 years, added more features including: blocking websites, adding breaks, scheduling, and passwords.
In 2014, I split the product into a free and paid tier. It wasn't an easy decision, but I was spending a lot of time on it by this point and customer support was also starting to take a serious hit on my personal time. In about two years (2016), I was making more money from the paid product than my well paying government day job. So, I decided to quit my job and work on my business full time.
Although I felt it was risky, the alternative was passing up an opportunity many people dreamed of having. I never planned to start a business in the first place and I kind of felt/still feel imposter syndrome. For now, I'm just enjoying my new found freedom and continue to be thankful for my new job. I'm going to keep it a lifestyle business for now, but I wouldn't be opposed to selling it as my exit plan.
I've spent (effectively) $0 in advertising since developing it and I'd say my customers come from organic search, external links, and word-of-mouth.
It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "successful" just yet.
How I got started: I do machine learning, and I methodically searched for places where people buy a service transactionally on platforms like Fiverr and that I think can be automated away (or greatly automated with human reviewers in the loop) with state of the art machine learning models. There are hundreds or thousands of such opportunities that individuals can solve on their own.
I'll be more comfortable giving sage advice once I've crossed the $10K/month threshold, but still I'd say a willingness to try a lot of shit out and get digging on stuff you have 0 familiarity with is mandatory. In this project I've had to learn javascript, frontend, photography, google ads campaign management etc.
Another tip I wish someone had told me is, build a pricing page from day one. The temptation to get _some_ signal you're useful to people will drive you to offer stuff for free, but that will end up getting you a lot of unwanted attention from people who will never ever pay.
It’s tough. There’s a reason a lot of companies spend $1MM from investors before launching a product, but I wanted to test the hypothesis that this need not be the case. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) definitely require heavy capital, and it’s becoming hard to do everything by myself. All the individual things that need to be done aren’t hard- it’s just that there’s so much to do in order to deliver successful physical products.
But I enjoy it.
Since starting work on the course in May, I’ve been through 3 iterations and made about $40k.
The ‘final’ version of the course will open for sale in early November, and I expect it to continue to be my main source of income for the next year or so at least.
If you’re thinking about running a course (I was very sceptical at first) or want to hear more, you can check out my recent interview on the IndieHackers.com podcast.
It’s been around two years now, and makes more than any prior engineering job I’ve ever had. You do have a lot of other stresses you might not otherwise have, but you’ll also work a lot less than at a traditional job!
I’m working on a few interviews for some sites, which go more into the details, and will post here when they’re done.
EDIT: feel free to comment here on anything or email me at joel at browserless dot io
Started 8 years ago, developed and published our first website for under $250 (I code, which helps). Learned SEO via trial & error, benefiting from the post-Penguin and Panda implosions that kicked a bunch of spam sites out of our target searches. Started putting together a predictive analytics package for investing in digital content, so we have an idea of how content will pull before we create it.
After that it was scaling and project management. Which has been a real learning experience, since a lot of publishing basically sucks... many people cranking out the same stuff. Very hard to keep "that special spark" in content at scale.
Still have the day job. Digital publishing is an 11 on the hot / crazy scale in terms of revenue stability (50% swings in monthly revenue on established sites aren't uncommon), so have a reliable pay check & health insurance reduces stress substantially. Plus I enjoy the work, most of the time.
One other benefit of having a "cover" day job: it allows you to "stay off the radar" as a small business owner and fairly affluent member of your local society. You've got a socially acceptable answer ("I punch a clock at company X") and don't stand out. Most people have no clue about the true scope and intensity of my side business, which simplifies things...
Found a niche that at least 600 people would pay me a monthly amount for, totalling nearly $3k a month. Costs are < $70 a month.
Everything is automated so it's probably less than an hour a week.
It was my learn how to code project that has become my basic income. All the money is funding my secondary project.
Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783 752 points - 6 months ago
The smartest decision I made was targeting a small niche market that larger businesses wouldn't bother with. I often get kind emails from customers thanking me for helping their industry. I kept things simple, didn't add features unless I really believed customers needed them, and didn't try to generalize the solution. I think those are the main reasons why the product worked.
By far the hardest part was/is marketing. I'm still bad at it. I've tried may things. Most failed or were too hard to sustain. Some succeeded, like Facebook ads, but those successes were often hard to recreate. At this point it's mostly word of mouth.
Working alone can be psychologically challenging. When I have a problem, there's no one to help because no one else knows how the platform works. With no one to bounce ideas off of, it's easy to get stuck in a rut going round and round the same set of possible solutions. And I really have to monitor myself to ensure that I don't get too isolated. This was an issue in the early years, but now I have a routine that gets me up and out and into the world every day. I would strongly advise anyone considering the solo route to carefully consider the social and mental health aspects of working alone.
I feel very grateful to my former self for doing the hard work that pays my bills today. And I'm tremendously grateful for open source tools and resources like Stack Overflow without which I would never have made it this far alone.
You might recognize classics such as "Legalize 4Loko 2020" and "BREAD" as featured in Elle magazine.
All on-demand printing. Order goes through Shopify's API to the supply center, order gets fulfilled, shipped. No inventory. Kinda pricey, but zero maintenance. Set and forget.
Find the most extremely dank and niche memes possible so you hit the little nugget inside of someone's brain that makes them want to spend $15-30 on a t-shirt.
A good print would net me somewhere like 300 orders a month. A sweatshirt could go for $50-60. You have options.
Recently I turned off sales because I was feeling more and more guilty about not having time to update it, and now that I work for Stripe updating it involves a layer of approval.
Of course, now I work for Stripe so I'd say it was a success :)
After 5 years it's making enough from subscriptions for me to live off (3K gbp/mo). The algorithm is always a work in progress but it's seeing consistent returns now so I'm making money from that too :) plus it makes golf a lot more entertaining.
The origin story is somewhat organic.
- Started as a logo design company
- then kept getting requests to help with UI/UX Design so I did
- then realised the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies
- today we're still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 companies, an Elon Musk company alongside awesome startups to our client list.
//Advice: Start with something small. Anything. Don't worry too much about how to grow. Then.. Just keep your eyes & ears open. Your customers will point you in the right direction towards bigger pinpoints & thus better growth opportunities. You don't always need a ton of traffic. Just start with something small and go from there.
Here's a startup idea I want, by the way. If this exists somebody please tell me:
I'm good at creating products. I'm a good programmer, I can do design well, I understand marketing well, I can sell things, etc. However, the things I am TERRIBLE at are basically anything involving paperwork. I hate these tasks, and I am terrible at them. I want a company that I can hire that will take care of all of my backoffice/HR tasks. So:
-An accountant.
-A lawyer.
-An HR person who can deal with compliance around hiring and firing staff.
Many of the aspects of software businesses can be looked at services, and fit well into an engineering mindset. Hosting is from digital ocean, costs $f00, and gets mentally compartmentalized. I don't care very much about how DA deals with routing, provisioning their own resources, etc. I tell them in abstract terms the things I want, and they provide them in a package for me to consume. Twilio does similar things for me for telephony. Coworking spaces do this for physical offices.
I want more of that for more traditional parts of business. Essentially I want to hire a controller in the cloud (or at least the way that controllers have been used at various companies I have worked at in the past). IF this exists, please reply with the name of the company! Maybe this means this is something I should start myself.
I don't know if I would call it a success yet. I want my revenue to reach six figures annually before I call it a success but I'm seeing good growth. Most of my growth now is coming from organic search engine traffic. I've posted some high-leverage page speed + SEO tips on Indie Hackers here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-damagi...
I'm a product/tech person with some graphic design experience but I was really weak on sales/marketing before I started working on ToDesktop. If you're like me (strong on tech/product, weak on sales/marketing) then I would highly recommend Julian Shapiro's guide on growth marketing. It's zero-fluff and written by someone with a technical mindset: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro
A one-person business is tough, it's lonely at times. It can also be tough to work on the things you should be working on (as opposed to the things you want to work on). This is enjoyable sometimes though, for example, I made my test suite dance to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk. Totally unnecessary but it renewed my enthusiasm and made for a fun tweet. https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321
Self-promo for those interested: ToDesktop automatically creates a desktop app from any web app. It's like Electron-as-a-Service with code signing, installer, auto-updates, app notarization taken care of. https://www.todesktop.com/
I launched it 2 years ago, mainly to help me teach a university class more effectively (I wanted something easy for non-technical beginners to learn). I spend about 5-10 hrs a week bouncing around developing and marketing. I make enough to hire a part-time developer that helps me with engineering. Otherwise, I do everything else myself.
The toughest part for me is marketing. Currently, I do a lot of writing on Medium to talk about the industry and will include a short call out to my platform at the end. I've tried other marketing channels like Youtube and Google ads but haven't found anything that beats writing articles.
While the platform is only 2 years old, I make almost 6 figures in revenue and it keeps growing linearly. My ultimate goal is to passively have this income take over my professional salary so that I can have financial freedom. I plan to continue to work, teach, and run this side business because I love all the different aspects that each venture provides me.
I've worked with a number of HN readers over the years.
It's just me - I have made use of the odd contractor for website design and copy. Upon starting the side project I wanted to see how large I could grow a business as a single person. It has been fun, but I also miss the team mate side of things such as brainstorming solutions and talking through problems.
Just a small handful of my favorites:
- Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $2900/month (http://bit.ly/35QXFhY). Competing with Google Analytics and tons of well-funded competitors isn't easy, but Adriaan's focus on privacy and simplicity has a strong appeal.
- Maker Mind by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, making $800/month (http://bit.ly/31FYK97). She's a neuroscience student and ex-Googler who writes fascinating articles about the intersection of neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and productivity.
- Makerpad by Ben Tossell, making $24000/month (http://bit.ly/2JeIEg9). Makerpad helps non-developers build complex apps where you'd typically expect developers to be required. My favorite thing about Ben is that he basically refuses to run a business that's not 100% enjoyable. He's shut down a working company or two just because the business model wasn't shaping up to be something he was excited about in the long run.
- Key Values by Lynne Tye, making $25000/month (https://www.keyvalues.com). Lynne helps developers find roles at companies that share their values, and she shares a ton of helpful tips for job-seekers in her newsletter. Her business model involves charging companies to put together the super in-depth profiles on her site.
- Carrd by @ajlkn, making over $30000/month (https://carrd.co). Card is a one-page site builder. AJ's an amazing developer/designer combo with over a decade of experience building one-page website templates and builders. I can't name any web apps I've found easier to use and more polished than Carrd, so it's not surprising AJ has many thousands of paying customers.
- Starter Story by Pat Walls, making $7100/month (http://bit.ly/35XdALQ). Pat interviews e-commerce founders about how they started their businesses. He was inspired by Indie Hackers itself and monetizes via sponsorships. Some people think you can't get an advertising model to work as a solo founder, but it's actually quite great if you're not afraid to do a little sales. Not only do you get to know your advertisers personally, but you can also hand-code your ads into your site instead of installing third-party JS that will track your visitors all over the web.
It's late so I'll stop here, but there are many thousands more.
The Internet obviously makes it easy to connect to millions of people across the world, which enables all sorts of niche businesses to exist that previously wouldn't have worked, because you couldn't have found critical mass in just your local environment. Plus it's cheaper and easier than ever to build and host your own apps.
I think this is the future, and 10 years from now we'll see a staggering number of people (mostly devs) running their own one-person businesses instead of working jobs.
It's not massively profitable (it's a side gig), I've restricted monetisation to AdSense in an attempt to not ruin the experience for users. I suspect other avenues of revenue are hard to come by in the niche; I did reach out to paint suppliers in the UK in an attempt to re-sell / possibly rebrand paints, but had zero responses.
The nice thing about running a business in a niche is that you get to interact with nice people. My customers are engineers, I practically never get those mythical "toxic customers".
The bad thing about running a solo-founder business is the stress and anxiety. These are difficult to deal with.
Thanks for posting, and thanks to all who have commented with their success stories.
What I did differently was I wrote everything from scratch, built the product databases, designed the graphics, wrote the front and back ends etc. I did it mainly as a learning exercise.
It never made enough money for me to live on, but for someone with modest outgoings it could have replaced their income. Sales started to drop off as the site design started looking dated and due to no mobile device support. I was busy with my better paying day-job at the time, and had no impetus to fix the problems.
I'm about to do the same again, but this time using dropshipping for stock and delivery, and I also intend to blog my journey (mainly as a record of what I've done) as I create each element of it, once again as a learning exercise using more modern tools/platforms.
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That said, it is very difficult to run a one-person business working from home. You don't have colleagues, people to discucss with, people to ask when you have questions, or to learn from.
I was living in France by then and I decided to go back to my home country as I would live much better there with that income. I started working as an assistant professor (30% of my time) and hired 2 developers to grow the business. That didn't scale well as the success came from my ability of being fast developer, good in SEO while always trying new website ideas.
I ended up again with a one-person business. But revenues are dropping and I find it harder and harder to be motivated to continue working on my websites. So now I work nearly 0 hour a week on my website and I am fully dedicated to a corporate job (not in academia anymore) even though I make equal money from both jobs.
If I can have an advice : try not to quit your day job. Work is not only about money. It is also about having social life, a career and a common goal to achieve with you co-workers. Working in a good company keeps you up with new technologies and trends. Running a one-person online business can be psychologically challenging. And once you earn enough money, the work to do can be become boring as no new challenges are there.
A friend of a friend was the COO of a brand, spent a couple mil to position themselves online strategically, but that team couldn't deliver results. As a grad student in ML I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues, SUPost (school-centric CL basically), and eBay, so I ended up being rather saavy at ecommerce. I offered to help out their store, then took it over when I got some initial results.
Ironically I think from a pure EV standpoint I shoulda stayed with my ML degree - my friends in the same cohort are averaging a mil a year in combined salary + bigcorp options. There were a lot of heartache and sleepless nights associated with running a company, and looking back honestly I would've had a more peaceful life toeing the 9-5.
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I have a few one-person side projects right now concurrently that are providing five-digit revenue that are hard for me to scale, but are enjoyable for me to do:
1. Domain expert in a hobbyist niche with high gatekeeping (skill and/or money) - I create a couple high quality content a year and make residuals off affiliate fees.
2. I flip small businesses in a very specific niche of ecommerce when they don't layer into my big business.
Note: this seems mildly prolific but honestly I have between 2-5 ideas a year of which I try to execute on 1-2 of them. I think of them as cognitive surplus, "Art projects for Fun and Profit-TM". Most ideas end up not working out, so the payoff really has to be about the process, not the result.
It's an equal mix of rewarding and frustrating. It's a lot more work than you'd expect and now I've a deep understanding of why support tools are as obtuse as they are.
It's generating enough income that's livable and freeing me up to focus on other related projects. I'm going to be launching a SAAS version of the plugin later this year.
Last year, I finally decided to treat it as a lifestyle business and just focus on a niche market. We are never gonna be a unicorn, but I think we'll still be in business 10 years from now. Looking forward to the 2029 thread!
Here's my post on the 2014 thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7368727
Personally, it might not be completely successful yet, but I started a music blog a while back (don't want to share the URL) just to test some SEO strategies. It's pulling in low four figures every month with very little work on my part.
It evolved to scratch my own itch: simplifying the access, management, and monitoring of a fleet of distributed Raspberry Pis (running Raspbian, on private networks) without requiring any proprietary client-side code. Though it meets the submitter's criteria, it's not [yet] providing enough to live off.
I am currently working on Enqode (https://enqode.io/) which is platform that takes a hand-drawn wireframe and converts it into a design file or code.
I would say that for any successful business requires a great deal of work to be done. On the surface it will appear that it is easy running such businesses but, in reality it is very difficult especially at scale.
- https://batgrowth.com: A website monitoring the growth of The Brave browser / Basic Attention Token, in terms of publishers adoption (Fun fact: Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, tweeted about the site)
- https://ethereum-cours.com: A CMC clone built mainly for fun, bringing some decent referral revenue
- My tech blog
I've built many more side projects, most were earning $0/month after a few months, but I've also sold 2 side projects, so overall it's worth the effort
I then used it to market my skills as a Software developer and it helped me gained employment.
I highly recommend any developer to start a blog, and just see where it takes you.
My blog is https://zeroequalsfalse.com
Sold our first book about a year ago and has grown steadily to the point where it could replace my day job. I've done blissfully little marketing beyond buying ads. Currently spend less than 1 day per week on it and during summer holidays I was able to keep it running from my phone with irregular connectivity.
It’s a tool for app store seo, would be the first one on the market of it’s kind, if I launched it just 2 weeks earlier :,)
Upon launch I announced it on hacker news, and wrote to the TC journalist that covered my competition. Got to front pages on both sites, and it was rather smooth sailing after that - I appeared on a few app store conferences and podcasts, did a bit of marketing, and all in all earned around $250k over the span of the few years (which is a very decent salary in Poland).
Finance-wise, it was an extremely important thing in my life, since it was my first own project that allowed me to earn a decent living, after over 10 years of trying various things. Got me from “omg I can’t afford rent” to “omg, I can stop worrying about money for a while”.
I also made a few important decisions over it’s lifespan:
- not taking vc-funding, and keeping it a one-person operation. the downside was that I had much fewer resources, the upside was that I didn’t need to build a unicorn, and could focus on a small niche (indie app developers)
- no free version, with good tutorials, good demo, and a good refund policy instead. twofold rationale: it takes some time to understand the tool, and I doubt free users would be so willing to take that time; getting free->paid funnel right can be challenging, and pushes the site into serving bigger clients really, not indie devs
- decided to not go for corporate clients, as those require sales teams and much more support. perhaps I lost a few clients (a few significant publicly traded companies used it for at least a while) and a lot of money, but this was more in line with my personality
- decided to move on to other things, again - more in line with my personality, where I like exploring new subjects, and don’t like staying in one place for too long :)
- decided to not sell it - I prefer the site to stay as it is, than to earn a few bucks by passing all customer data to someone else, who would most likely scrap the site altogether and forward the domain to them
- keep user privacy as the core principle - there’s a ton of cool stuff that could be built based on the data within that site, but it’s against the principles
All in all, it was an amazing ride, that really got me off the ground as an antrepereneur, and I really hope provided a lot of value to the few thousands of paid users that passed through it over the years
(written on mobile, sorry for formatting)
I got started doing it as a fluke of writing tutorials and then realizing a pattern around people using the OSS tools I made to help me write the tutorials (people were using the tools to build their apps and then coming to me for help and I realized "oh hey, this is a business!").
My blog URL is: http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me
When I started it was because freelancing was terrible for me and also I wanted to have flexibility with time and location. But now I'm getting tired of working on my own, hoping to have a team soon. Currently there are too many ideas I am unable to implement due to time constraint and also sales/marketing isn't my expertise (I'm a tech/product dude).
We were then attacked by competition and shut down, leading us to sue in federal court. See Thimes Solutions Inc v Tp-link et al
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15690011/thimes-solutio...
If you're spending alot of time on your own, managing & building up your start up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...& good ambient music on in the background ;-]
I created it in 2014, neglected it for awhile, and it was running on its own. It started to form a little community around it, so I finally got myself motivated to re-design this year.
It never made any money up until quite recently through some affiliate marketing channels, so it's not huge, but it covers the operating cost, which is very small.
For those who are looking to get into running your own little projects, come and have a look around. If you want to sell your projects and move on, then well, I'm happy to host your project for sale! :)
Any Ideas or help would be highly appreciated
In a couple of months it's already paying for my expenses.
For now I'm fixing things that frustrate me while I work on my Mac (managing windows, tracking all my devices).
I have a long list of things I'd like to see fixed in products I use and products I'd like to see come to life, so I'm planning to spend this year working on that.
Site: https://fadel.io/
While working as a web developer, I found myself having to do a lot of manual checks or write scripts to test if new pages or changes to existing pages were following a long list of web best practices. I eventually wrapped up all this knowledge and automation into a finish product that others have found useful.
Started out making a single game as a weekend project, it got a good reception, so there was obvious demand for learning to code in this interactive way. Have since branched out to more games covering different HTML, CSS, and JS topics with more coming. It's continued as a one-person operation, for the time being.
It covers all my basic living costs. But I kind of got bored (again) of being happily unemployed (for the second time), and started a small consulting business on the side. A four-day workweek in addition to the Radio Silence stuff keeps me quite content.
- Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs that are made for you from about 20+ job boards & 100+ company pages.
- Using filters based on your skill preferences & location, Remote leaf would be able to know that job that befits you and send you job postings daily or weekly to your inbox.
We charge SMBs less than $10/mo and have over 80k paying customers. We kind of hit the equilibrium between churn and new users so it may grow a little more but we have likely peaked.
AMA
I would like to know a sampling of age or status. Are people with the successful side projects fairly settled down?
2. The first four years of Plenty Of Fish (POF.com) was a one-person business. https://codecondo.com/plenty-of-fish-adsense-earnings/
3. Overcast (overcast.fm)
4. stratechery.com
Working on two other projects — one's a hobby, and one's a SaaS that's scratching my own itch.
I monetize via a subscription-based model.
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-fina...
Drew did some Q&A on Lobsters about it:
https://lobste.rs/s/r41yfm/sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_repor...
Drew wants to run a business completely on free software and for free software, and he seems to be doing it.
This business has been a huge source of security in my life that's freed up a bunch of time for me to focus on more meaningful life improvements, like diving into hobbies (outdoor climbing, improv and standup comedy, musical theatre, travel, and other more fleeting passions) and optimizing wellness (sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships). I think it's the best possible way to make money.
I got started by stumbling on patio11's side-project-turned-full-time-business Bingo Card Creator. I remember reading about how he was able to quit his shitty job and just work on his Rails app that generated bingo cards and thinking "well shoot, I could do that."
I saw that Patrick was in a community of people doing a similar thing that all go to the same conference: Microconf. Tickets were pricy for me right out of college (I think they were around $800 at the time), but I promised myself I'd buy a ticket with my first $800 in profit so I could fly out and thank him in person.
I had a high level game plan for how I was going to be working on a side project like Bingo Card Creator while I was working as a software developer. Part of that plan was needing to figure out how to accept credit card payments online. I found Stripe and thought it was the coolest API ever, so I picked up one of the side projects I'd made in college that had a bunch of people bugging me with emails asking for new features. I implemented the features, but added some extra code that put them behind a paywall. They'd have to pay me to use features I'd already coded, the fools! Bwahaha.
I was pretty surprised when—the same week I was finalizing my very first Real Job out of college—that side project started making $300/day. I thought it was a fluke, but it kept rolling in. I didn't do any marketing or have a business plan or know who my customers were. I'd built a thing for myself and other people apparently wanted it too.
I bought my microconf ticket three weeks later. Patrick and I have been friends since :)
My path is totally not the route I'd recommend. I think I got pretty lucky with stumbling on product market fit. If you're reading this and are interested in doing something similar, I've learned a lot more about what I did accidentally right from taking notes on all the Microconf talks[1] and chatting with more people in the Microconf community that have made similar businesses. I'd love to help coach you through how to build one of these puppies for yourself! The classic mistake I see people making is obsessing over an idea instead of a group of people with a problem you can help solve. Your idea almost doesn't matter at all and it's probably not even a good idea. Focus on who you're helping and the things they complain about instead.
PS: I go into a little more detail about how I got started on Episode 23 of the OK Productive Podcast[2].
1. https://microconf.gen.co 2. https://okproductive.com/episodes/023-3-hat-productivity-wit...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FQ2PFNN/
I take it's probably a roundup of his newsletter but I found the book half way decent with mostly fresh insights that is, it wasn't heavily recycled compared to most books on this sort of thing.
