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I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $ 6, 000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $ 20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I’m an IT Administrator in my day job and make $ 400 per month. I live in Ethiopia 🙂 I thought this inspires my fellow HN. Good day.
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Some people stay in jobs not only for money but for other minor stuff. They continue because they don’t want to work alone, keep pushing themselves, keeping a routine, etc.
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******
Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.
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Have you considered starting your own business out of an office? That’s more than enough money to support yourself and do what you want.
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Not OP, but some reasons could be:
What happens if he gets banned by Adsense?
In many countries, people don’t understand the concept of lifestyle business (even if it brings multiples of salary in revenue, like this case). It is considered “prestigious” and safe to have a job (It doesn’t make sense, but it is how it is).
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What’s the quick website?
Well done on getting your operating costs so low, I think that’s the key to getting things up and running.
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I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I’m a single developer with no employees. I work between 10 – 30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300, 000 €. This year, it’s going to be around 370, 000 € (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30, 000 €. It’s been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while.
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.
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Curious what in app purchase plugin you use for Cordova. The one I’d been using has been abandoned.
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>release a prototype after 2-6 weeks
I’m in the situation where my product overlaps significantly with others but brings (IMO) some missing features and a better overall experience. I would love to launch quickly but feel I need some feature parity with competitors first.
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>This year, it’s going to be around 370, 000 € (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so).
Is your business focused on the German market or the US market? Or is it multi-lingual / international? What percentage of time is spent answering support requests?
>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).
Have you experimented with different pricing models? Is Duolingo / Tinder model (1 month / 6 months / 12 months) the best choice for B2C subscriptions without Spotify / Netflix- like ***********************
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German market only. Going international is an option I considered, but it is a lot more complex than simply localizing the app. Since I make more money than I need and I don’t want my job to become a different one (I still get to code a lot), I didn’t do it yet.
>”Have you experimented with different pricing models?”
No, I kept the pricing model very simple. The price increased a bit throughout the years. I charge what feels fair.
There’s a trial period and if you like the product, you pay for it. If not, then not. There is no freemium, I never give discounts, I don’t sell ads or data or make money in any other way. It’s a simple thing:)
Some people claim that it’s easy to test prices. But this is not true.
If you serve a niche, people talk. If one person pays more than another for the same product (and signed up for the same version at a similar time), you’d lose trust.
The nice thing about making more money than you need is that it frees you from thinking about “making even more money “. Yeah, I like making more money, because all of this could be over one day, but there is no need to stress myself about it.
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>If you serve a
Another thing probably is, that a subscription price of a niche product can be considerably higher than of a mainstream one?
For a single person, it must be much easier to support 1, 000 users paying something like $ 25 / month than 5, 000 users paying $ 5 / month.
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******
Thanks for asking this, because it is a thing that many many people have in their mind: “Will support requests crush me?” And this was actually my biggest fear when I turned my hobby project into a commercial one many years ago. The reality is this:
I have over 10, 000 paying customers. I receive maybe 5 emails per day. There was never a time when I received much more than 10. I have three explanations for this:
1. I have a really good FAQ that answers almost any question. On my contact form, I urge people to read the damn FAQ. If they still send me an email, I usually reply with a specific link to the FAQ item. If a question comes up a couple times, I add it to the FAQ.
2. Since my product isn’t free (and not cheap compared to a 0. 99 one-time-fee app), there’s a lot of self-selection. I don’t have to support freeloaders with their stupid questions. If people pay for something, it seems to help to reduce the support burden.
3. I wonder if this is a mentality thing and Germans are more likely to help themselves through reading FAQ than others who rather send an email like “yo, shit is broken, fix asap”. Most emails I receive read a lot more like a letter and not this one-line blurp bullshit some have to deal with.
In essence: Build a product with a somewhat sophisticated target group. They are more likely to pay, more likely to help themselves by reading FAQ and more likely to send no stupid emails.
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I don’t think I’m alone here in desperately wanting to know what business this is. 🙂
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I have so many questions , but let’s start with a few ones:
Is this a web application or a smartphone one?
What did you have to learn, tech-wise, to be able to build it?
How long did it take you, from your first line of code until you released the first prototype?
How did you get your first user (s)?
How did you get the business idea (without details)? Was it a personal pain point, or did you work in that field before?
And congrats BTW, it looks like you did an amazing job.
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>”Is this a web application or a smartphone one? “
It used to be a web app, but nowadays, most people use it as an app.
>”What did you have to learn, tech-wise, to be able to build it?”
At first, PHP. Then JS. I’ve been coding for 15 – 20 years now. The app is made in Ionic Cordova. As I wrote often here on HN: End users give zero fucks about the technology. Most people (unless they’re designers or coders) don’t even see the difference between a native app and a hybrid one.
As a single developer, Ionic is great, because you have truly one code base for all platforms. If the apps were native, I probably couldn’t do all of this by myself.
>”How long did it take you, from your first line of code until you released the first prototype?”
2-3 weeks, and then I iterated a lot with actual feedback. But: I didn’t introduce a pricing model for the first couple years. It was a hobby back then. It also was a different internet. So take this with a grain of salt. I don’t have experience on how to start a niche product and get paying customers from day 1.
>How did you get your first user (s)?
Through forums.
>How did you get the business idea (without details)?
A friend of mine said: “It’d be great if there was a software that could do X “. It wasn’t directly my own pain point, but of a friend. I didn’t work in that field before, but read a lot over the years to acquire the domain knowledge.
Thanks:)
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I’d argue that only the last two questions are relevant.
– Both web and smartphone apps can create this kind of revenue. – The tech stack is 99% irrelevant unless the end customer depends on it, which in 99% of the times, isn’t the case.
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Please note that I have just edited my answer and added a question, so your comment actually refers to the 2 questions before the last one.
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>I’m a single developer with no employees. I work between 10 – 30 hours per week.
I’m curious – how much time do you spend on marketing? How do your customers find your app?
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Nowadays, I spend zero time on marketing. I have a whole bunch of well-written articles on my subject. They still rank okay on Google and are evergreen. Marketing these days is word of mouth SEO.
But for someone starting out: Write articles that teach people something (in a niche). Articles get read for many years. Social media posts go down after minutes.
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Good idea. Are the articles teaching how to use your software to solve an issue people have, or do you just mention / link to the software in the end of the article?
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The latter. The articles teach people about the niche domain / subject. The app is merely mentioned as an option to make life a bit easier.
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I develop and sell Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I’d be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I’m constantly amazed by how well Cursive does.
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.
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I cannot believe that you make more from such a niche dev tool than your job at Google. I always thought people who use clojure / scheme would be using their custom setup in emacs or vim.
I’m interested to learn more details , how things were when you first started out selling the app and the trend.
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******
As a Clojure (and Java) dev, I started with Cursive and eventually moved to emacs w / CIDER as I became more comfortable with it. Cursive is great for people new to the language who may not know emacs – learning a new language is challenging enough without also having to constantly refer to an emacs cheat sheet:).
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You say that but one thing that i always dislike when i consider taking a look at Lisps is how everything seems to be either on Emacs or looks like it’d really like to be Emacs.
Personally I want a full blown IDE that takes advantage of advanced modern technologies such as displays that can draw individual pixels, have a model of the codebase that allows advanced features such as word completion and preferably fits nicely with the underlying OS. A debugger would also be nice, but i understand that sometimes i ask too much.
I wouldn’t mind paying for such a tool (though i do mind DRM schemes and subscriptions – i want to be able to pay once and then be on my way). Cursive looks something i’d pay for if i was really interested into Clojure and was using macOS.
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Actually, there’s completion, and excellent debugging tools for Clojure in Emacs, both step-by-step kind, and investigative. “I don’t want to use Emacs” is a completely valid stance, but it should not be misinformed.
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>Cursive looks something i ‘d pay for if i was really interested into Clojure and was using macOS.
um … it runs on Linux and Windows as well .
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I just wanted to ensure you about my total support as a paid user, and patience during that bad year. Thanks for your product!
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I runhttps: / /updown.iosince 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I’m working about 5 – 10 hours per week on it. It makes about $ 6, 000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time, make something useful, delight your clients, and don’t try to become uber or airbnb.
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******
I sell carnivorous plants online . It’s not my main job / revenue so it doesn’t fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job.
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
– 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 minimiz e 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 optimization 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.
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Whereabouts do you ship to (and if possible can you share a link or something)? I’m always looking for more Europe / UK plant suppliers!
I’m also trying to start up a small online plant shop but am finding it hard to a) get the growing space, and b) get the interesting stock – would love to hear about how you dealt with these issues when first starting up! 🙂
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My website ishttps://phito.be🙂
I ship in the EU and any other countries that have trade deals that allows plant transfer without requiring phytosanitary certificates (Switzerland for example)! Sadly after Brexit I don’t know if I will still be able to ship over the UK: (
) Finding the growing space is hard, especially if your plants are big. Thankfully I focus mostly on the Drosera genus, which are mostly small plants. multiple plants in a 7x7cm pot. I grow the winter-hardy ones in a greenhouse, the tropical ones are grown inside under LEDs.
Finding rare species is not too hard if you have good contacts in the community (I’ve been part of it for more than 10 years, so it was relatively easy for me). The hard part is propagation. Thankfully for me, a lot of Drosera are really easy to propagate by leaves cuttings but for the species that are not easily propagated, I work with an university that propagate them in tissue culture for me.
Good luck with your project, it requires a lot of work but if you’re passionate about it, it won’t feel like work!
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Given that any competitors may also face the Brexit problem and it hasn’t happened yet, why not start a subsidiary now and ship a bunch of product over before Brexit comes into effect?
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Yeah there’s been a lot of Brexit talk in the orchid communities, it’s a big problem because of how hard they are to propagate – there’s only a few orchid nurseries left in the UK that can grow from seed because you need a lab setup, which is a huge shame
I’ve had good luck growing a few Drosera from seed, never even thought about leaf cuttings, that’s super interesting!
Hopefully depending on Brexit I’ll be able to order from you next Spring! Do you have a mailing list or something?
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Yes Brexit is a real mess for plant collectors (and for almost everyone else, but that’s just my opinion).
Looking forward to send you plants, make sure to say you’re from hacker news in the notes of your order;) I don’t have a mailing list yet, although that is a good idea and I will look into it for the next season!
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In this market, the demand for certain species is much higher than the offer. So I just advertised in the online carnivorous plants communities that I had these species for sale on my website. People rushed in to get them and bought other species alongside.
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I runhttps://pageflows.comand have been living off it full time for a little over a year.
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.
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This is great! I assume most of your customers will be businesses, so why not offer a bulk “@domain” subscription for $ 999 (lifetime) so that anyone in the business can use it without restriction. Restrict the other packages to personal use and you should be able to drive up your income.
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Most customers are indeed businesses . Great shout on some sort of team / business plan – it’s on my to-do list!
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Nice project! I keep onboarding screenshots for most Sass / web apps I use to get inspiration later for my own projects so I definitely find this very useful (bookmarked!).
How do you monetize the project? I can’t see any paid plans in the public website
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******
I’ve commended to a response below with the business model, but yeah I’ve just started trialling a freemium model yesterday so need to update the rest of the site with clearer pricing plans etc.
Until yesterday there was no freemium access, it was just paid up-front to access all the content. $ (per quarter or $) *************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************** (per year.)
Your use case is kinda where the idea came from, most product people do something similar. The hard part is adding enough relevant content on Page Flows for enough people!
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I literally just switched to a very limited freemium model yesterday (just trialling it for now), but before then it was just pay to access.
It’s $ 39 per quarter or $ 99 per year for access to all the content.
Quite a low priced product with decently high churn, so I’ve been trying to find ways to increase the value.
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Honest question, doesn ‘ t this creep people out? I mean, I’m obviously not the target market but I find it awkward enough when sites pop up those “Hi I’m, how can I help you? ” chat windows even though I know they’re just a script. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I’d bought something a while back from a site and I got a personalized video from the person running it.
(Then again I did buy a Klein bottle a few years back and it came with basically a photo commentary of it being shipped and that was absolutely awesome, so …)
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Bonjoro is such an awesome idea! I was aware of it, but never thought to actually try it out myself. I’ll look into it!
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Higher pricing than i would have guessed. But I guess it solves a professional pain point so worth it
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Very interesting idea, I didn’t notice kind of need for designers until now. When I code for a game, I also check for other games, it might be too opinionated but they also have some common experience at their navigation and I find it quite helpful.
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Yeah I certainly think there’s room for something similar for the gaming world, especially as some gaming categories are so competitive.
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Thanks! I started a related newsletter a few years ago that has good reach (https://uimovement.com) and that drives some traffic. SEO is also a decent source, plus some content marketing and word of mouth.
I’ve recently started experimenting with ways to grow the traffic above the base level, but it’s slow going tbh.
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I run a series of events for people who run agencies. (By agency, I mean creative, marketing, or technology agencies.)
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 offeri ng 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/]
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I have a one- person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year.
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 73 k 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 priority, 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.
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I run a business called FontPeek (https://fontpeek.com). It doesn’t provide the majority of my income, but it does provide a meaningful amount and it’s constantly growing (pretty linearly). It’s a simple tool that allows font designers to add a secure font previewer to their web store. Only needs like an hour of technical support a week, and it’s currently costing me nothing to run because Firebase has incredibly generous pricing.
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.
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(not a designer) I would not start my 7-day free trial without beforehand having more information on what the product looks and feels like.
In the “How FontPeek Helps “section there’s” Show your fonts “sections, but it shows no fonts. I’d love to see some demo fonts / pages with embedded fonts at least, perhaps a list of links to the designer’s websites showing the widget (I assume it’s a widget, there’s no info on it) if they consent.
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Just for my understanding, as soon as someone buys a cut of a font and uses it in a web context, it is basically “out there” and could technically be downloaded by anyone visiting that website since there is no font DRM right? Is this mainly targeted at people making fonts for print?
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That’s true but the real business of font is not selling to any average people but to designers and companies, as part of corporate identities.
In fact, it’s quite easy to download some non-free font (let’s say Helvetica) and to use it on your web page. Then
– either it’s a personal page and very few people will see it (and even less notice that it’s the “real” Helvetica and not a free simili-Helvetica) … so there’s almost no risk to be sued for copyright / stealing. You wouldn’t have bought it anyway.
– or it’s a professional web page (or design or …) – high traffic – then you can be sure to be sued if you use it but didn’t buy it.
Same for business card: nobody will really notice if you use a stolen font on your own business card but you can be sure that everybody will sue you if your business is to print business cards and you propose fonts without licenses
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I was also curious so I’ve taken a look at it (but not in detail) and it looks to me like it sends what you type to the server that generates an image in real-time using the font, so you don’t have the font itself, just what it’s going to look like with your text.
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I run a VPN service & make $ 3ka month. Found a simple & clear niche for at least 600 people on the planet willing to give me a few euros a month.
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I’m working on FormAPI [1], which helps developers fill out PDF documents. I started working on this around 2 years ago. I was mostly working on it part-time, and I took a few breaks while I was doing freelance work to pay the bills. This year I raised some money from Earnest Capital [2], which has allowed me to go full-time and hire some contractors.
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.
[1]http: // formapi .io
[2]http : //earnestcapital.com
[3]https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/
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I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago ( (https://www.mendskin.co) ) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time.
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.
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From the list of businesses in this thread this was the one that caught my eye. However, I am Australian and a lot of the time businesses don’t ship here. Like you say, it’s a physical business, you need to move physical products.
I opened your website and immediately looked for shipping, ‘countries you ship to ‘is nowhere to be found until checkout, where there is a dropdown with no options other than the USA.
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Are there mail forwarding services that cater to people in your situation? Would you pay $ 10 – $ 15 plus typical US-to-Australia shipping costs for this service? I guess I’m wondering if this is a business opportunity for someone to provide a US delivery address and then forward the mail abroad.
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Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, shipping outside of the US is pretty much all we can do at this point, I’m sorry to say.
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Cool! I used to run an ecommerce website a few years ago, 50 K usd / month revenue.
We used to get our customers from seo only.
If I had to do it now I will probably try Facebook ads email list.
How do you acquire your customers?
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That’s interesting. We too run ads on Instagram and Facebook and Google, but we’ve only found customers via Google Ads.
I’ve tried campaigns for gathering email addresses, but that didn’t lead anywhere.
Right now we’re testing affiliates
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It’s a shame he hasn ‘t updated the financials since 2017 tho. I always liked reading up on it.
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I have a UK based e-business, I’ve turned over between £ 750, 000 and now £ 950, 000 over the past four years (ex VAT). (~ 76% net profit margin)
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.
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I runhttps://encycolorpedia.com/– its origins are from a “JavaScript as CSS” library I was developing – there were / are superior projects available, so ultimately I used the color manipulation code to produce the site. The idea was to take a seed color and render the page uniquely, additional on-page information grew from that. From feedback I guess the primary use of the site is paint searching and comparison.
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.
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If you also own encycolourpedia .com, you should probably set up a redirect. If it was someone else that grabbed it (registrar is different …), well that’s unfortunate!
I have a domain I got for a future project where there’s a UK / US difference, so I made sure I got both.
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I startedhttps://www.virtualhere.comabout 10 years ago, it provides a good income. I developed / sell / support everything myself. I felt there was a need for this type of product 10 years ago and with cloud computing / gaming its become very useful for a lot of use-cases now.
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I’ve used VirtualHere a couple years ago when the Steam Link was brand new and used my racing wheel with it, worked like a charm!
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I’ve been running Instapainting.com as a 1-person business since 2014. I started out with a single page with a Stripe checkout button on it. I’ve been living off of the income since inception, even though the first few years were poverty levels of income;). Many have tried, but I’d say most just gave up when they realized they could make more money just getting a job.
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I have been runninghttps://www.sanitycheck.io– an SEO tool. I built it originally to help me with my own SEO consulting work, but it has grown from being a side project to my main source of income now. Literally just this month it has reached the point of being able to support me full time. It has taken 3 years to get to this point.
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.
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Had a look at your site, and requested access, as I think it would be useful.
That said, I’m not super clear on what it does. The landing pages could really benefit from listing a few specific features, and listing the business outcome that results from them.
I get that it does automated page speed testing (is this different from kingdom). Other than that, the main thing I’m aware that it does it “improved google search console reports”.
But what does thatdo? Listing some specific report types and the resulting business outcomes would really help. (eg saved time on task X, increased ranking on page Y, more revenue from a higher CTR on product Z, I dunno)
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Thanks – great feedback. Always trying to improve the home and feature pages and I do agree on your points. Have considered getting an explainer video created.
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I runhttps://picojump.comwhich I started this year.
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.
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I runhttps://IndieHackers.com, which was inspired by threads like this one on HN. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people running successful one-person SaaS businesses, and many thousands more have created pages for their products here:https://www.indiehackers.com/products
Just a small handful of my favorites:
– Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $ 2900 / month (http://bit.ly/ (QXFhY) )). 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/ 31 FYK 97). 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/ (XdALQ) ). 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.
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I run Sales for Founders ( (https://salesforfounders.com) ) – a course where I teach (mainly technical) founders just enough about sales to find their first customers and grow to $ 10 k MRR.
Since starting work on the course in May, I’ve been through 3 iterations and made about $ 40 k.
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 mo re, you can check out my recent interview on the IndieHackers.com podcast.
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I launched ToDesktop back in April, I’m ramen profitable and I’m working on it full-time.
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 youshouldbe working on (as opposed to the things youwantto 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/
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When I startedhttp: //fairpixels.pro(UX / UI Design for B2B Saas Companies) I grew it pretty quickly to a very profitable one-person business. (Not 1 person anymore)
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 realized the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies
– today we’re still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 com panies, 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.
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Yeah I know. The website hasn’t been updated in a few years. We’ve been talking about a redesign for over a year (just didn’t get to it because it was so busy) Finally added some extra hands to get it done. Should be live in 2 weeks or so. Despite the handful of technical issues we have today .. the conversion rate is still very healthy.
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For the period of 2008 to 2014 I built and ran an online webshop [1] selling Bath bombs and soaps – the product was specifically picked because in 2008 there wasn’t that many online shops selling low cost bath products in the UK.
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 formeto 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.
–
[1]http://www.jaruzel.com/files/fuzzybuttons – 2012 .JPG
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A little bit of social media (twitter posts, product page on FB), and a big push via Google AdWords at Easter and Christmas. Sales tended to be fairly seasonal so we focused on those periods.
Also, spent a lot of time getting the meta tags on every product page exactly right – which I felt (at the time) was the benefit of rolling my own shop front-end instead of using one of the pre-made big name shop engines.
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I’m doing pretty well selling a WordPress plugin,https://mediacloud.press/
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.
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I can relate. Everything is always a lot more work than the usual “I can build this on a weekend”. If it’s a good product, there are so many details and edge cases the software considers, which aren’t obvious if you simply build a clone. Only a true customer feedback and improvement cycle can make a product better.
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I created PartsBox (https://partsbox.io/) and I’m quite happy running it. It’s a tool for companies building electronics (also available for free for hobbyists / makers). The business was (and is) a “freedom project” for me: I wanted to be independent of everyone, so no investors, no partners, and no employees. So far it has worked out pretty well.
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.
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I’m really happy to find this (honestly, I haven’t been looking that hard in the past – just assuming that spreadsheets were the best approach). The site looks really polished – well done.
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They found me. I created the app, and people searching for certain phrases started finding it. There was some word-of-mount from hobbyists and makers, but not that much.
To this day I mostly rely on search engines for customer acquisition (before you ask: yes, I tried, and measured carefully: every attempt at advertising had a net zero effect, eg I was putting money on fire for no good reason).
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I have been buildinghttps://www.flowboardpro.com– It is an artist management software for agencies. I went full-time on it in April of this year & have been working solo on it since. I have 3 agencies using it which is right now enough to pay off my bills. This month I’m wrapping up all the feature development to focus on the marketing side of it.
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I’m runninghttps://makeplans.net. SaaS online appointment booking. Bootstrapped and profitable.
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).
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I turned a software development blog into a profit-generating asset in 2 years.
I then used it to market my skills as a Software developer and it helped me gained
highly recommend any developer to start a blog, and just see where it takes you.
My blog ishttps://zeroequalsfalse.com
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Still the same answer, I develop the firewall app Radio Silence (https: // radiosilenceapp.com) for macOS.
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.
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I recently sunsetted it ( as in – no longer accepting payments for it), but over 7 years I was running AppCodes.com.
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 $ 250 k 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 r eally 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)
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I’m runninghttp://remoteleaf.com– Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs based on your individual skill preferences & location. We source best remote jobs from over 20 job boards and tons of individual company hiring pages.
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I know a successful two -person online cloud provider. One person is hard unless it’s a very specific niche market. With two people you can have one with the gift of gab and one with the gift of code.
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Heard some friends do dropshipping on places like Amazon or Shopify, although I can’t attest to the validity / how successful it actually is.
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Not a good idea if you have are required by law to take returns (eg the country where I live). Returns go to the seller, not the drop shipper. Read about some cases where the seller suddenly had to manage their own stock of returns and had to stop their business because of that.
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To be successful as an one person online business maker you need loads of self motivation & some self control over procrastination.
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; -]
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These kind of comments are very interesting, and I bump into them now and then when I express aspirations to do something.
On the other hand driven people comment the same way on people “just” taking a job working 9 to 5 and appreciating being able to not work hard (well, procrastinate, not motivating one-self, etc.).
I guess this is an area where empathy is really hard.
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I had to look up what ambient music was and I found out that listening to it agitates and annoys me beyond belief. So that is rather a big assumption about music taste you have there.
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I found I needed music to keep me motivated, and after trying out Rock / Metal (my normally preferred genre), I cycled through baroque and classical, and eventually ended up settling on Trance / EDM. It ended up just being all about the BPM matching my typing speed (about (bpm).
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I doubt that. The success rate for running a profitable social media powered business is very, very low. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who try maybe 5% of them makeanymoney, and 0. 05% make enough to quit their jobs. The number of people who qualify as what most people would call financiallysuccessful(eg a stable mid 6 figures income) is even lower still.
The creativity and freedom might still make it worthwhile, but the chances of being a breakout star areEffectively (zero.) *********************** [2]
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Not to mention, that the burnout rate is VERY high. People should not underestimate the pressure of producing interesting content every couple of days for years without being able to take a break.
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Not really. Social media is a horrible way to try and earn a living. The only way you can really do it is a patronage model like SubscribeStar or Patreon or some kind of gigging like live podcasts or selling merch like t-shirts or prints. You can be famous and make less than you would at McDonald’s easily.
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Incomes on social media are highly skewed power-law distribution. PieDiePie / Logan Paul make millions while everyone else makes pennies.
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I heard levels.io (twitter.com/levelsio) makes like $ 50, 000 per month off of Nomad List , and I’m pretty sure it’s a one-person thing.
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