> 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.
> Has recent shutdown of economy affected your business?
The product allows you to send pictures in the mail to your loved ones via SMS. It works great for getting fresh photos to your grandparents who might not be super savvy with a computer.
My brother started it a few years ago and makes enough now to keep it going. Probably is the classic definition of a lifestyle business, but I think that's a success even if it's unlikely to be a unicorn.
Also and more importantly, the product helps to bring hundreds of families closer together, which is especially important right now given our elders are cut off from contact.
Gumroad helps creators sell digital products directly to their audiences. We're expanding to Memberships this year.
I wrote about most of the story here: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...
And COVID-19 has been a boon, as we help folks earn a living from home. We'll see if it sticks!
Yearly (subscription) revenue is at about $500K USD now. It has been growing by less than 10% for the last few years as I haven't been that interested in growing it - I want to work less, not more.
So far I haven't seen any negative effects because of COVID-19 in terms of revenue. If anything there seems to be a slight uptick in new subscriptions and slightly fewer support emails per week.
- MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress: https://mc4wp.com/
- Boxzilla Plugin: https://boxzillaplugin.com/
- HTML Forms: https://htmlforms.io/
The shutdown halted international shipping from Japan to over 100 countries, so I’ve had to pause subscriptions for the time being: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/on-pause-due-to...
I’m taking this as a much-needed break from running the site!
I got started over 10 years ago now, making Flash-based games and licensing them to various web portal and publishers, which was good money for a student back then! A little indie game developer golden age where you'd get a lot of players and also a few thousand dollars per game without too much trouble. I went on from there doing self-published games that anyone can buy on Steam or the Mac Store, both of which provide about 90% of my revenue, and the remaining 10% are from smaller stores and game distributors.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke... <- My current project.
In 2 days, I'll be launching a second product for a similar audience. https://phoenixigniter.com
Elixir is a tiny market compared to something like Ruby or even Rust, but it's my stack of choice and I love helping grow the ecosystem.
Starting out, I got my first 10 customers for Trunk by talking to users on e-commerce forums and focusing only on features that would help solve their problem. I didn't have any account management features (forgot password, change password, etc) or even obvious features that would make their lives easier (filtering, proper search, etc) for an embarrassingly long time. I still don't have a lot of these things! And the pricing page still... the horror. Instead, I dedicated all my energy to making sure inventory syncing covered all edge cases and worked reliably.
COVID-19 has actually contributed to an uptick in business, especially with brick & mortar businesses that are now looking to also go online.
I'm a one man[2] team and have been since the beginning. I built it with PHP, LESS, JS, and good old HTML. I love answering all support emails because DM's users are so helpful and often have tremendously kind things to say. I guess it's because I took on the task of replacing Google Inbox.
DarwinMail is not as successful as some other companies run by solo-founders making 10k+ MRR however I feel really happy with what we (the users and I) have accomplished so far.
It's been almost two years since I wrote the first line of code and I very much enjoy working on DarwinMail each and every day of the week (even during dinner sometimes).
[1] https://www.darwinmail.app [2] https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous
Check out the top products.
https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...
There’s also a massive longtail of people making no money too.
Making something that people want and will pay for that sustains a business is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort to get the first few paying customers.
Last year, I shipped nearly 4000 packages. My customers love our products, and most of our growth comes from word of mouth.
It's a single person selling a terminal and IDE color scheme for developers.
You can see live revenue/traffic here, as I share it all:
I have no funding, no debt, no employees, just revenue and profit margins are somewhere in the 80%-90%.
Nomad List got started when I was traveling and working remotely ~2013/2014 and wanted to discover more cities that would fit the criteria of nice weather, affordable and fast internet. Since then I've added hundreds more criteria and it's become a giant database, and also a community. The community is how it makes money as people can pay to join the site and access a chat, a trip planner, a forum and many more features.
Remote OK is a much more simple business as it's just a job board. It got started because after building Nomad List a lot of people around me wanted to start working remotely and traveling but didn't have remote jobs. There was like one remote job specific job board back then and it was quite limited. I thought "why not aggregate remote jobs from traditional non-remote job boards". So I did that, and slowly started selling my own job posts on the site which is how it makes money now.
The Coronavirus has substantially affected my business:
Nomad List especially has been affected losing over 50% of its revenue. The site is made for people working remotely and actively traveling so that is to be expected during this crisis. You can even see the complete disruption the Coronavirus brought to traveling members of my site, scroll down to "Trips Taken by Users" on https://nomadlist.com/open.
Remote OK is less affected and might even get a positive effect out of this crisis since remote work becomes more popularized and mainstream during and after this. There is in fact a rise in jobs posted, scroll down to "Job Posts Sold" on https://remoteok.io/open.
Personally I'm less affected financially since I don't have employees and I've saved most of my revenue over the last few years, hardly spending anything. Most people have told me to repeatedly over the years to hire and spend more, but I did the opposite. That means I have a very solid cash buffer now so I can weather this storm quite well. I feel sad/scared about other businesses with high costs that might not be so lucky, especially the employees involved.
also, doing anything in the education space is worth checking out... in other words, charging people for what you know is a well-worn strategy! an ecourse or online course isn't hard to put together... i did one literally with gumroad and notion docs!
Sadly, I have seen an uptick in revenue as a result of COVID-19, because my website is showing up a lot in search results for toilet paper.
Originally the idea was to create a new textbook, but I found it easier to pair lessons with browser-based multiple choice quizzes that would hit the material home. Given the success of the first student, I thought it might be something people would be willing to pay for.
Since then, we have been adding a steady stream of helpful learning tools in addition to the textbook/curriculum that we are rolling out. There are dialogues with audio recordings so you can listen along. The entire curriculum is frequency based, so you are learning the most frequent terms first, which has proven invaluable with our students.
The recent shutdown has definitely affected our subscription rates, and I suspect the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics until 2021 did not do much for the enthusiasm for learning Japanese this year, but you never know. On the brightside, it gives people more time to prepare.
Learning a new language is an investment in yourself and your brain health for life. Language learning is building a bridge where there is a chasm.
The recent shutdown has increased interest organically.
Covid19 has been a blessing to us since all our books are online and both writers and readers get to chat with each other alongside the story they are on.
Both started from open source projects of mine. I love building open tools and stumbled upon the fact that I could sell services around these projects after people started reaching out for support and extra features. I improve the products incrementally every week and eventually it adds up.
The virus shutdowns have affected Textbelt a bit because many of my users are small businesses doing appointment reminders and such.
https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about
https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-youtube?r_do...
It's a privacy solution that allows you to download apps from Google Play without having Big G claw into your smartphone.
The tech stack is quite extensive: Java for the application itself (Eclipse toolchain), LAMP for hosting the billing system (build on php, bootstrap and fatfree) and the website (build with Hugo using bootstrap).
COVID-19 hit hard. Even though I see more downloads, people seem to have become cautious with spending money.
If anything I’ve seen a slight bump from COVID. Lots of people with time on their hands who want to launch an MVP.