Successful one-person online businesses?

I earn about 50% of my income from my business which currently includes https://LaTeXTemplates.com and https://LaTeXTypesetting.com. In the coming months I'll be releasing a product in this space I've been working on for years so I'm pretty excited about that!

I run Cold Turkey: https://getcoldturkey.com

It started as a fun side project in university. My friends needed something to block themselves from playing WoW so that they could study.

For three years after graduation, I've continued to work on it in my spare time. In 2015, I decided to see if people would buy the pro version with more features. As it turns out, yes! I was able to quit my job to work on it full time a few years ago.

I Kickstarted Fractal Filters in 2014 and still derive ~90% of my income from it — www.getfractals.com. Amazon's widespread adoption in the US and foreign markets has terrible implications for several industries; but it has really been helpful for my business. This xmas I'm doing the biggest numbers I've ever done which has been fantastic.

BetaList ( https://betalist.com ) turned 10 years old today. For the majority of time it was run by just me, generating $100k/year in revenue on average (earlier years less, later years more). I’ve now delegated all the daily operations to a contractor who spends a few hours a day to keep things going. So technically it’s two people right now, but less than half a FTE total.

I run https://www.checkbot.io/ :)

> Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems.

It grew from automating manual audits I was doing for client work. It was especially useful when I was making risky changes and big refactors to large websites where it was hard to predict which pages would break.

I run TinyOctopus LLC. I create apps and software for niche markets. 100% a one person gig.

All of my products have started as something I wanted for myself, but also realizing that others would likely pay for them too. My first iOS app is now 9 years old but it existed on the Pocket PC and the Palm Pilot years before that.

https://TinyOctopus.net

edit: forgot to add, I do make the majority of my income from these apps. It is possible for small players to make real money on apps - 5 figures for me. A key for me has been to not undercharge. Despite my apps being priced much higher than others, I rarely get complaints about pricing.

I posted about my new company in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 and got some good feedback and a bunch of orders about six months ago.

Now I've started getting some decent traction (nothing crazy, but numbers keep going the right direction steadily and I just introduced a new product for Black Friday that brought my average purchase up significantly). I've redesigned the site (in hindsight it looked pretty terrible when I first posted it) and am having professional photos taken of the products as we speak.

It's really exciting, and I'm thankful for the bit of early validation I got from HN.

The company is Cooper's Treats, a dog treat business: https://coopersdogtreats.com/

I run an ecommerce business selling board games accessories. It's been way more successful than I thought it was going to end up being.

https://www.burgertokens.com

I started http://folkd.com a social bookmarking service back in 2006. At the time Mashable called it a decent digg clone ;) I almost moved to the valley in the web2.0 phase to seek funding, but decided to stay in my home country to finish university. For 14 years now the site is providing a solid passive income from ads and freemium accounts as I was doing all of the coding and hosting myself. I moved on to other things for quite a while now, but the site is still going with good traffic and minimal effort. I think it could be much more, but I lack the motivation to rewrite the old PHP base. If someone wants to take over, shoot me an email to bk@folkd.com

I run https://csper.io. It's a web app that simplifies some web security stuff Content Security Policy (CSP).

I helped setup CSP at a company back when I was an intern (2013). I learned that CSP can be an unpleasant experience.

A year ago I decided I wanted to do something new with my life so I quit my job and Csper was born. Hopefully it makes CSP easier for other people.

It's not super profitable, but it almost pays my rent, no complaints.

I run SideProjectors and Newsy.

https://www.sideprojectors.com (a marketplace for people to buy and sell side projects)

https://www.newsy.co (a tool to turn your un-used domain into content-aggregator like Reddit)

I launched monetization for both of them early this year and things have been slow but steady - looking forward to developing them more in 2021!

One you might like if you haven't seen it already (it is from a couple of years back) is "The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875 (and later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196626 ).

I wish more people wrote up blogposts like these: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/

I help people settle in Berlin and deal with German bureaucracy. I started it a few years ago, and now I live from it. It's a really satisfying job.

https://allaboutberlin.com

Started my e-commerce business back in 2009 to earn some pocket money while studying and dabbling with entrepreneurship.

Since 2018 I work on it full time and have grown annual revenue triple digits 3 years in a row. In 2020, the company generated an average €56k per month at around 11% profit through 8 webshops in niches in the beauty sector.

I hired some specialist freelancers to improve SEO and SEA but let them go bcs of COVID. 3 weeks ago hired my first “employee” (freelancer 1hr per day) for customer service as I’m finding answering emails very annoying and time consuming.

Hopefully it’ll allow me more time to develop the company further. I have more niches in mind and can always expand into other countries with my current niches (which is not always successful).

The work itself is liberating, though and frustrating. I often flow from feeling alone and incapable to victorious and relaxed, and back.

I personally know few people who own a company and I know no one who owns an e-commerce. Something which makes asking questions or getting help difficult.

Online I often feel overlooked; the startup world focuses a lot on programming and building software. I’m fully aware building your own product ánd a business at the same time is million times harder than what I do. Nevertheless, I’d love to be in contact with people going through similar issues and phases as me.

Not sure the ending of this post totally fits the topic intended, so to finish on a positive note:

Only a small percentage of companies make it to €1M annual rev, a barrier I expect to pass in 2021. Moreover, growing a company brings hard and interesting challenges; eg being a solo entrepreneur I’ll need to let go of my individualistic nature and improve my social and management skills in order to work well with my current and hopefully future employees.

For the curious, one of my shops is https://electricnailfiles.co.uk.

https://redocker.com profile guided recompilations of Linux containers, AWSLinux2 packages, macOS arm64 Homebrew packages, and maybe a PGO WSL2 5.x kernel.

Downloads for optimized binaries and profiler binaries will be requester pay S3 buckets that anyone is free to mirror. It will monetize from re-compilation as a service, and eventually compete with AWS Codebuild to generate faster builds at a fraction of the cost with an interface as simple as yum/apt.

Also some UNIX CLI tooling as a service behind Lambda/Batch where you provide a signed S3 URI to operate on.

Looking for a better payment/auth provider than RapidAPI.

I’ve run the foreign-language education app https://pollylingu.al few several years now

Some of these HN pages are gold. This is one of them.

Thanks to everyone for their great feedback here. It’s an inspiration for us all.

Maybe I'm paranoid but even when you're a single person business it's always better to have some warm bodies around you on the About Us page. Especially if you're a B2B. Single person companies automatically require a lot more scrutiny as a supplier in a lot of procurement departments.

I built and run https://keygen.sh.

Thanks for the link to last year's. I'm sort of looking forward to seeing who responds this year.

By OP’s definition mine is not a successful business, but wanted to share anyway.

I build and run https://onetracker.app. In 2020 it generated about $1-2k/month in revenue from ads and IAP. I started it due to my need for a privacy-respecting and automated service for tracking deliveries. It’s nowhere close to becoming the majority of my income, but it’s been a fun experience developing and running it.

https://PhotoStructure.com is just me, and I'm delighted daily by great user feedback.

> Defining successful as a profitable business

Ooooh. _That_ kind of successful. Nope, not profitable yet.

I've been profitable with this little side project of mine that connects Calendly to Slack

https://www.calenduck.co/

I've been selling pH, ORP, and temperature sensors for MCUs (in practice, most users use it with Raspberry Pi) for a few months. Not enough for a significant income, but fun, and I hope to expand it with the addition of a standalone, multi-sensor device soon. Great experience learning, and communicating with customers, even though the profit isn't there. https://www.anyleaf.org/

I run https://optemization.com.

Formally, its a "digital operations" agency but I'm experimenting with a newsletter, YouTube videos and selling Notion templates.

Made $55k in 8 months. Idk if that's successful but I'm having a blast.

I make 100% of my income from Bettersheets.co and I'm one-person running it.

The majority of sales comes from the AppSumo deal I'm running now.

Hey you should check out indiehackers too It’s community of people running businesses as one man operation

I’m running https://www.p3r.one

I’m building Open Source tooling in the DevOps area and custom SaaS platforms for startups. Doing this from germany and making 100% of my income with it.

https://expose.sh It's a tool that will expose a local web server to the internet.

Used for webhook testing, client demos etc.

Simpler CLI interface compared to ngrok.

The Polish bookmarking service.

Ptable.com provides most of my earned income. Spent quarantine doing a major redesign. No frameworks or libraries and the full payload, WebGL, property data and all in under 64K.

Yes, app publisher. The first version of my biggest app I wrote in 4 hours.

Me for the last 8 years. Sometimes it's difficult, but I'm trying to outsource tasks to some freelancers when it's possible.

I launched https://forwardemail.net out of beta on Nov 23. Within twelve days had thousands in sales. This is also an open startup at https://forwardemail.net/open-startup.

Stock trading

Hacker News[1] is pretty much a one-person (dang) business

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/