> 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.
> Have any recent trends affected your business?
I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe frameworks on $5 dollar VPS's and lost interest. 2021 I sold the remaining three income generating websites for just shy of 1mill US.
I started the projects with a second person but ended up buying out their interest and running solo. I consider it success because I managed to last over a decade making on avg $400,000/year gross with that business "umbrella".
Advertising and publishing changed and continues to change by leaps and bounds on a yearly schedule. A lot good a lot bad, but its the same business over the years.
And another batch: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/81714acf995e4968bb220684...
There's also @levelsio who's killing it with multi-million / year solo business: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/de943f80c7924745abf9405f...
I am happy to report that I am now running a very successful one-person business and killing it!
Only joking... I'm still reading HN posts about successful one-person businesses for inspiration and working for the man. Time does fly though...
I write more about it here: https://sahillavingia.com/work
It was a natural outgrowth of working remote and then async to lean on the hourly contractor model.
It’s a little tough to scale, so we built some custom software to do payroll, contracts, etc: https://flexile.com
And I've been making products within the Better Sheets umbrella myself in sheets. The developer is helping to add features to the site, but if/when they leave I can continue running completely solo. It's been my full time income for the past 1 year, and I expect to continue running it for a decade or more, at this rate.
I'm continually learning more ruby on rails to keep building tools baked into the site. And will ultimately combine Google Sheet integrated tools into Better Sheets instead of keeping them separate as it is now.
Better Sheets started as a purely content site. I started with with a carrd page and gumroad payment. Now it's all types of contents, courses, blogs, and tools. As well as a library of tutorials.
The recent trend of AI has made my extremely excited to keep building. I built a Google Sheets AI assistant: https://asa.bettersheets.co/ and will continue to work on it until Google releases their own and probably keep working on my even with a Google Sheets AI from Google. As I imagine I can take it in a iterated/pivoted direction once I see what they do release.
The total revenue each year, with roughly 40% going into my pocket each year.
1st Year: $34,000
2nd Year: $67,000
3rd Year: $95,000
I made it after Google shut down their Chrome Web Store Payments system and I realized how annoying it was to take payments in extensions. So I made it for my own extensions and also for anyone who wanted to try monetizing their extensions with payments. The included library is open source if anyone is curious: https://github.com/glench/ExtPay
So far it's made extension developers around $175k. Pretty cool!
Microconf is dedicated to mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders and has a lot of members and content who fit the description above
I've had an intentionally-small business that I've been working on for a few years now, but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering. I've done a very good job of replacing Shopify with WooCommerce, Google Analytics with Plausible, exploring about every static site generator as a replacement for my slow CMS, automating my social media content, etc. I've done an absolutely shitty job of growing the actual core business. Particularly for those of you coming from jobs in a corporate environment, how do you keep your focus on your core offering instead of spending all of your time "fixing" your tech stack?
It's been running for over 4 years with about 10k active blogs. I'm the sole founder and maintainer. I write about it at https://herman.bearblog.dev
It pays me an above average salary and is mostly unaffected by the recent financial trends. I have however been dealing with a lot more AI generated backlink spam since ChatGPT hit the internet.
It's a website + mobile apps that help users track what they're watching (TV shows and movies).
I wouldn't say trends over the years affected the business much, but I'm playing with the ChatGPT API currently to try and improve some aspects of the functionality and maybe add some new cool AI powered features - so there's that.
https://www.lunadio.com/blog/the-story-of-a-unicorn-solo-fou...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i8j5te/i_made_a_free_...
I personally consume payment notifications from Stripe or PayPal, and the rest is processed in-house: updating sales records, generating QR code tickets, sending invites to a private conferencing server, and so on.
I handle the customer service and outsource the upkeep of the B2C tools. Most of my time is spent on bizdev for the B2B licensing, which is where most of the revenue comes from.
We have seen some slowdown in new conversations with B2B partners. Companies that are laying people off have a hard time justifying new outside partnerships/costs, even when those partnerships are structured to increase revenue and profits. But we've still done some important deals in the last couple months, and we're still moving forward in talks with companies large and small.
Some larger companies have even said that it may be easier to structure a deal now, since they otherwise would have been pressured to hire new employees to achieve a certain goal. Now they aren't allowed to hire, so the door is more open to a partnership with a company like BeeLine Reader. I imagine pricing conversations will be more constrained, however.
I use Flutter which has saved me a ton of time - which is very limited in a solo business of course :)
I'm experiencing good growth currently, so I can't say recent trends have negatively affected me. I did notice a sharp ~20% reduction in Google traffic about 10 days ago, but that could be related to all kinds of things.
It will be interesting to see how the recently improved (push notifications) iOS PWA support will affect my business. On the one hand I'm stressing about it, on the other hand PWAs have existed for 10 years or something and barely any regular consumer has one "installed" on their smartphone. But who knows, maybe the improved iOS support will lead to more usage & customer education by businesses.
Started 5 years ago next month.
Flight/hotel/car rental search, plus deals that I find for Australians.
Running it is actually fairly easy. It started as a deals site, then I added in some whitelabeled software, mailing list, fb page, and frankly it's a numbers game - more visitors = more ads/affiliate revenue.
It's not huge, but it's been interesting at least, and very little in the way of expenses.
It's been running for over 2 years now and provides steady recurring income - I've prioritized continuity over exponential growth. Have reduced operational work to a minimum now so I can spend most of my time working on marketing strategies to make it big ;)
I run a small one-person business in a niche industry selling a 'widget'. Profitable from day 1, pays all the bills but is not the sole income.
Got started by seeing a need in an adjacent industry and building the product. I do everything myself: dev, qa, support, everything. It's not too bad at this size, and I can probably scale and continue on my own at 10x the demand.
Word of mouth keeps things rolling so far and recent trends haven't impacted me much.
Someone else posted and I second, spending (wasting?) time on the "stack" instead of the product offering or marketing is easy to do and rarely benefits things. It's hard to do things like advertising or product refinement which I don't find interesting.
Started that company about 10 years ago. It's a social network for online publishers. Thankfully, sites join mostly through word of mouth and advertisers mostly set their campaigns to renew monthly, so I usually focus on product development.
I also recently launched https://www.forourschool.org
A free platform for schools that they can use to run their activity based fundraisers (e.g. Read-A-Thons). I build it for my kids' school but made it so any school can use it. Now that my kids' Read-A-Thon is over (increased their donations by almost 50% yoy!), I am working on updates to it and hopefully bringing it to more schools.
It's currently using PayPal to handle the credit card payments but I'm in the process of adding an option to use Stripe.
The accounting is pretty simple, I keep a portion of the artists registration fee and the art show gets the rest effectively making it 'free' to the art show itself.
I don't have an online biz, successful or not. I find these inspiring and depressing. Depressing because I feel like I never have any ideas.
Everyone always say look at your pain points or scratch your own itch. I don't seem to have an itch and as for pain points I just seem to go the flow and don't think of anything as a pain point.
[1] - https://remoteleaf.com
I actively avoid programmatic/invasive ads. My three income sources are: subscriptions (without paywalling anything), direct advertising deals, and content deals with other, bigger publications (they get priority to publish my stuff first, I publish later).
Last year I started an English-written blog[1], translating the best from my original, pt_BR one, in an attempt to reach a bigger, international audience. Slow start, but I'm fine with it — none of my business was an overnight success.
The revenue varies, but averages somewhere around $2k/month (which is good and mostly profit, but not enough to live from it alone in Amsterdam).
> Have any recent trends affected your business?
I thought the GDPR and privacy laws would make more businesses switch to self-hosted analytics platforms, but from what I can see, not that many really care about it enough to ditch sending data to 3rd party services.
I am still hopeful about the future, almost all customers really love the product once they use it. It feels like I am always so close to "making it work", but this feeling has been there for a few years already now.
I am also trying different things, like creating some more niche variations of the product which are easier to market, so I built https://wplytic.com, which is a trimmed-down version of UXWizz meant specifically for WordPress (fewer features but with less resource usage, better WP integrations, easier installation, cheaper pricing, improved privacy, etc.).
What should I do to get it right? Is it possible to get an US or other entity just to be able to have some kind of relaxed paperwork?