How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?<p>Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
Here's a couple of links you might like, although not all of them are exactly what you're looking for:<p>- <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/</a> (of course)<p>- <a href="https://www.starterstory.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.starterstory.com/</a><p>- <a href="https://www.authorityhacker.com/undercover/" rel="nofollow">https://www.authorityhacker.com/undercover/</a><p>- <a href="https://failory.com/" rel="nofollow">https://failory.com/</a><p>- Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? (Jan 5, 2017): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535</a> (thanks @jbonniwell)<p>- Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? (Mar 9, 2014): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243</a><p>- Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding?: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208</a><p>- Pieter Levels - Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups (1h presentation): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0</a>
For the past 20 years I've been a recruiter, and a few years back I started a resume writing and career consulting business called Resume Raiders (<a href="http://resumeraiders.com" rel="nofollow">http://resumeraiders.com</a>). It's a literal mom & pop operation and I do 99% of the projects myself.<p>I started the business because I've always loved writing, am good at navigating tricky job search and career situations (I've seen it all after 20 yrs in recruiting), and I enjoy it more than recruiting. I also noticed most resume writers didn't really have a background in hiring, but rather were just trained writers that probably had a hard time making it in journalism or other areas.<p>I'd been writing resumes for my recruiting candidates for many years, and many of those candidates would rely on me for career advice as well. It was odd to provide career advice as a third-party recruiter, as there were times when I might have some financial interest in what a person does. As an example, if someone approached me and said "Should I leave my job?", a recruiter might say "yes" with the thought that if this person leaves I might get a placement fee if I help them find work.<p>Resume Raiders is now my primary focus and has been quite profitable since it started. There is very little overhead. I live in a pretty expensive area, but my clients come from all over the world. I also offer a discount to HN'ers (see my profile page).
Pieter Levels is the creator of:<p><pre><code> - https://nomadlist.com/
- https://remoteok.io/
- https://hoodmaps.com/
</code></pre>
And he just broke €50,000/m a few days ago: <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/968027544103473152" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/96802754410347315...</a>
I run Scribophile, one of the largest writing communities online, as a one-person business, though I have a ton of help from our volunteer forums moderators.<p>The story is pretty unimpressive... I had the idea back in the days when web 2.0 was the new hotness, so I decided to make it happen and use it as an excuse to learn web 2.0 technologies. It was a freemium model from day 1, though I didn't expect many people to buy the paid upgrade.<p>People seemed to like it, paid upgrades were getting sold, and after a while of it being a hobby I realized I could live off the earnings and decided to make it full time.<p>It allowed me to spend many years being a digital nomad back when that sort of thing wasn't quite popular yet. I traveled to a lot of places and met a lot of fascinating people. Now I'm settled at home but those years of my life were priceless.<p>These days we're one of the largest and most respected writing communities online, at least 3 of our members have been in Writers of the Future awards ceremonies, and our members regularly go on to be published by major publishers and smaller outfits.<p>I should also emphasize that having one's own business doesn't mean you're a millionare, like many assume. I make a comfortable living but much less than you'd think if you pictured a "business owner guy". I still very much consider myself a success, because I get to do what I love, and on my own schedule. (For example I took a little time off to start a new hobby, standardebooks.org, which produces high-quality, modern ebook editions of public domain literature, and releases them free of cost and via CC0.)
Tarsnap. I have an employee now, but I ran the company myself for the first ten years and from ~2011 onwards Tarsnap has been the vast majority of my income.<p>I got started by... well, sitting down and scratching my itch. I wanted good backups, and it turned out that other people wanted them too.
I'm running BazQux <a href="https://bazqux.com" rel="nofollow">https://bazqux.com</a> paid feed reader. It's my only source of revenue.<p>I wanted to read comments in feed reader (there were few forums with very interesting discussions) and Google Reader only allowed to read blog posts. So I've started developing my own feed reader.<p>I believed that comments reading feature is killer and thought that Internet is big and many people will like it and I will be rich soon ;) I saved some money and quit my job to focus completely on my product.<p>Guess what? After initial release nobody purchased my product. I was quite disappointed and started asking people what they didn't liked (turned out to be the most important thing to do). And I've started to add features they've missed, asked again, improved again. And got first purchase few months later and second purchase few more months later.<p>Few times I thought to abandon project. But then Google announced it will discontinue Google Reader. By that time I had more or less usable product and got a lot of new clients and a lot of feedback (which is very important). Worked like crazy for a few months and after Google Reader was closed I've had enough clients to pay the bills.<p>It's still in active development with a huge TODO list.<p>Can't say that it is success. I would make more if I go to day job (and won't worry as much about what to do next to have income in the future) but I'm working on my own project, talking with my own clients, using technologies selected by me and can work on my own schedule (although after being burned out and birth of baby I returned to working 5 days a week in office -- my own office indeed, with piano ;)<p>Having one-person online business is definitely possible but it's not as romantic/easy as it sometimes shown. "Wow, this guy could work on the beach" is actually "damn, I must work even on the beach".
I've only made about $5.00 on it so far (certainly not enough to retire on), but my latest endeavor is looking quite promising: <a href="http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz" rel="nofollow">http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz</a>
Not sure if you've checked <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/</a> before, it's full of such stories and those are amazing and inspirational. Because those are not your Googles or Amazons, it's just solo business that are very practically approachable.
I created and run The Online Slang Dictionary - <a href="http://onlineslangdictionary.com/" rel="nofollow">http://onlineslangdictionary.com/</a> . It's the eldest slang dictionary on the web.<p>I started it in 1997 when I was in highschool. I found it interesting that slang terms frequently heard just the year before were already passe. I thought it was something that was worth capturing.<p>It affords me a modest salary in a fairly high-priced area, on around 2.1 million visitors a month. I estimate that it would get 2.5x - 3x the traffic (and hence the earnings) if google weren't up to strange shenanigans with the site's rankings.
I run BugMuncher on my own (<a href="https://www.bugmuncher.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.bugmuncher.com</a>), I've been working on it full time since October 2015, and it's been profitable since November 2016, providing all of my income.<p>If you're interested I've been documenting the entire process of taking BugMuncher from a side project to my full-time job on my blog starting here - <a href="https://www.bugmuncher.com/blog/from-side-project-to-profitable-start-up-part-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.bugmuncher.com/blog/from-side-project-to-profita...</a>
I built a fully automated self-service Instagram publishing system, no private API hacks or such, but instead, by completely automating lots of Android phones (OCR, pattern recognition, etc.). Mainly offered this to small businesses and friends. Took off due to Instagram’s popularity and made six figures after a while. Now contemplating to shut down, as Instagram has opened up publishing access to hand-picked partners.<p>A second business focused solely on Twitter analytics. Was about to shut that down years ago when Twitter suddenly offered free analytics, but it barely changed sign-up rates, so I kept it going.<p>On good days, I answer one or two emails, that’s it. The occasional one-week-of-hell when things go sideways
mixed in every few months, of course.<p>Now looking for the next project.
I run <a href="https://officesnapshots.com" rel="nofollow">https://officesnapshots.com</a> which highlights office design projects from around the world.<p>I guess I don't technically qualify for these posts anymore since I've hired a couple employees, but it was a one-person business for 9 years before doing so.<p>The basic origin was seeing photos of Google's offices and looking for a website that showed photos of other offices. There wasn't one so I made it.
Sidekiq is a one person business. The creator, Mike Perham, gave an interview about what it was like building his business: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/sidekiq-6e71309457" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/sidekiq-6e71309457</a>
I run IdeaCheck, which validates startup ideas by running a survey within the idea's target audience. Started in early 2017 and it can now sustain me full-time.<p><a href="https://ideacheck.io" rel="nofollow">https://ideacheck.io</a>
Paging patio11[1].<p>Patrick McKenzie is a HN celebrity that, in a previous life, blogged about his small consultancy and SaaS products[2]. His insights about A/B testing and automated sales emails are worth their word-count in gold.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/</a>
I have been running a very unsexy business selling WordPress plugins for the last 5 years, averaging about $30K in revenue a month.<p>Only expense is my time spent and a $5 Linode VPS that hosts my shop & update server.
I develop Cursive (<a href="https://cursive-ide.com" rel="nofollow">https://cursive-ide.com</a>), an IDE for Clojure code based on IntelliJ. Strictly speaking it's just a plugin right now, but that's how most of my users use it.<p>I worked on it for about 2 years, mostly in open beta, and started selling it in December 2015. It's been the only thing I work on and has provided all my income since then.
Not quite at the majority yet, but at the current rate it should be by end of year. I run two websites:<p><a href="https://projectpiglet.com/" rel="nofollow">https://projectpiglet.com/</a><p>I launched that in January, but the investment advice I've used for years (when it was a couple python scripts). It's regularly making 100% yoy returns for me, so I'm happy. Kind of different than most startups / businesses though. In late January I launched the paid version, and I'm getting a few trickling in every day. We offer one month free, every month you provide feedback (meaning I get feedback more than money ATM)<p>My other business is <a href="https://easy-a.net" rel="nofollow">https://easy-a.net</a> - it makes me a lesser amount of money, but enough to keep both projects running without me paying for infrastructure.<p>Those are combined under my C Corp, so I look at it as a single online business. Utilizing same tech stacks, methods, etc.
I've started one after listening to a lot of indiehackers podcast's. Mine is <a href="https://browserless.io" rel="nofollow">https://browserless.io</a>, which is IaaS, and I just hist ~$1k/mo at about the 3 month mark.<p>Still not providing the majority of my income, however it's growing to the point where it will in a year or so, depending how things go. If anything else it's been a wickedly fun ride, and I've learned quite a bit in doing it.
Here's an awesome list of resources for indie makers :P <a href="https://github.com/mezod/awesome-indie" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mezod/awesome-indie</a>
Coderpad [1], an interviewing platform, is run by Vincent Woo [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://coderpad.io" rel="nofollow">https://coderpad.io</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=akanet" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=akanet</a>
I sell random stuff on Amazon, buying wholesale. Current run rate is ~200k/month, more in Q4, figure profit somewhere between 5-20%.<p>Started 2 years ago buying from stores etc, shifted to wholesale a year ago.
I run one-man security consulting business. Pays well enough to live comfortably and provides enough free time to work on side-projects.<p>Six months ago I started transitioning from service to product oriented approach with online vulnerability scanning service <a href="https://getroot.sh" rel="nofollow">https://getroot.sh</a> aimed at network administrators and webmasters.<p>I have another product targeted at penetration testers in works, to be released in couple of months.
I built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200/month at this point, so I recently gave up my job to work on it. It's growing fairly steadily, because people really value not being advertised to, and that's been fantastic.<p>I'm also pulling together a bunch of disparate services to make it a great experience, including SSO to the community, paywalled content and a custom emailer that integrates deeply with the CMS. So far, so good, and I basically slammed it all together until it worked over the space of a year -- but the real work was three years of sending a weekly newsletter as well to build up an audience before I even launched this thing.<p>At some point I'm planning to sell the application I wrote that powers it, because there's a distinct lack of 'community in a box' platforms that can solve this problem. First I have to finish it, but that's kinda the end goal.<p><a href="https://char.gd/recharged" rel="nofollow">https://char.gd/recharged</a> if you'd like to try it! The code best-friends gives 25% off for three months.
Working on a new view for Indie Hackers that will allow you to filter more powerfully. For example, revenue-generating businesses with a solo technical founder and no employees: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/products?employeeCount=0&founderCount=1&techSkills=code" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/products?employeeCount=0&founde...</a>
I do freelance development work and sell video courses focused on building and deploying web apps.<p>I started by thinking to myself "what would happen if I tried to make training videos?", slept on it and dove right into it the next day without knowing anything about creating videos.<p>Hosting fees and a hell of a lot of time are my only expenses.
Stock trading robots, everything on autopilot, makes much more money than my "real job" as technical team lead for big corp.<p>Truly lifestyle business running from the cloud and not looking for investor, customers or employees...<p>One day will leave to my kids to run...
I do employ a few people now, but in the beginning, it was just me for about 4 years:<p>OSREC - <a href="https://osrec.co.uk" rel="nofollow">https://osrec.co.uk</a>
Bx - <a href="https://usebx.com" rel="nofollow">https://usebx.com</a><p>Got started with OSREC because I could see a gap for a good suite of tools that could automate mundane data tasks in banks and hedge funds. Also, I did not enjoy my investment banking job.<p>Got started with Bx because many people complained to me about Quickbooks/Sage/Xero and I thought I could do better :)
I specialize in creating useful apps that help me, first and foremost, and then share them with the world.<p>I have released these two products:
<a href="https://callmeprivate.com" rel="nofollow">https://callmeprivate.com</a>
<a href="https://textmeprivate.com" rel="nofollow">https://textmeprivate.com</a><p>Working on some apps that I haven't released yet dealing with some telecom API, I got the idea of having a phone number without having a phone number to stop scam callers from calling me. But that evolved, of course... I started a virtual number service that privatizes your phone number with many added options -- basically your phone number can become a very useful piece of software.<p>I released Call Me Private about 3 months ago on Hacker News ( <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905375" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905375</a> ) and just started marketing it a lot the past few weeks.. so far, I've got about 12 customers or so. Since I've released it ... I've also had a few organizations contact me for some minor customization requests, which I was able to make happen. My early customers are definitely helping the product to evolve more to suit their needs... and what they are asking for.. I usually weigh whether it would be beneficial to that one person ... or many. If its able to help many, I spend more time on it. If just that one person.. I might or might not, depending on the usefulness of the feature.
This is my story<p>I started a resume company focused strictly on ATS optimization immediately after college with my best friend after we noticed how many peers were woefully underemployed.<p>A year later, after mild adoption and the co-founder deciding to focus on his career, I moved to South Korea to localize the company which the goal of supporting Korean universities & to escape the competitive pressures of the US.<p>Things are going well these days.<p><a href="https://rezi.io/" rel="nofollow">https://rezi.io/</a>
Currently doing ~$20K combined from <a href="https://www.toofr.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.toofr.com</a> and <a href="https://www.inlistio.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.inlistio.com</a>.<p>Also have these in the hopper - <a href="https://www.thinboxapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.thinboxapp.com</a>, <a href="https://www.enps.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.enps.co</a>, <a href="http://www.glist.io" rel="nofollow">http://www.glist.io</a>, <a href="https://www.voxloca.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.voxloca.com</a><p>Idea is I'd love to cycle through them, sell whatever's working after a couple years. It takes time to find the right business at the right time so I advocate 'incubating' a project in the background, building SEO, seeing if it catches. It just takes time.<p>I'm polishing off a book about it now -- <a href="http://www.parallelentrepreneurship.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.parallelentrepreneurship.com</a>. It incorporates a lot of the wisdom in the comments here. (And I'm taking notes on the stuff I missed.)
I ran a one man side gig for a couple years (farm management software). Got it to $200k and growing after 6 months in the market but I needed to bring the development in-house.<p>Could've used outsourced talent for all dev and customer support but interestingly enough the reason why I hired was "what happens to all of our customers if I die?". I felt like I owed it to them to put a team in place, albeit a small one.
Hi, I started and run park.io by myself. It is a place to backorder expiring domain names. I started it for fun and it grew into a business. You can read or listen to an interview I did on Indiehackers here: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park-io" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...</a>
Coollector Movie Database:<p><a href="https://www.coollector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coollector.com/</a><p>Small income, but profitable.
<a href="https://brandfountain.com" rel="nofollow">https://brandfountain.com</a><p>I have curated a stellar portfolio of brandable domains geared to startup community, allows me to dev other projects without raising seed. I succeed by being flexible/sympathetic with early stage companies, expect to reach six digit sales on almost autopilot.
Breach Insider is a one person bootstrapped company: <a href="https://breachinsider.com" rel="nofollow">https://breachinsider.com</a><p>Been live for a few months now and enjoyed finding the balance between sales and producing new features.
Additional discussion of one person businesses from about a year ago here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535</a>
(Un)successfull one-person business is <a href="https://botproxy.net" rel="nofollow">https://botproxy.net</a> (rotating proxy) Started couple of months ago as I needed such a service for my other project and I thought why not to make it as Saas. Now I have a dozen of active subscriptions and balancing around 0 in monthly profit while having to do a lot of work to keep things going. If I knew in advance all the stuff I know now would never start anything like this but now I feel sorry for the effort spent to just quit. literally everything went not as expected. So I warned you.
$50k/month with my current business: Manypixels (<a href="https://www.manypixels.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.manypixels.co</a>) I do work with many freelancers though.
<a href="https://stratechery.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com/</a><p>Not exactly a conventional business, but I believe he does pretty well for himself.
Think about a product/solution/service that scales revenue without scaling directly with your own time. For example, tutoring would suck because the revenue is tied directly to how much time you spend. However, a tutoring portal where you connect tutors with students can scale in revenue beyond the number of hours you can put into it. In other words, you want something that makes money while you sleep.
I'm running <a href="https://ipdata.co" rel="nofollow">https://ipdata.co</a> which is an IP Geolocation API.
It's been 5 months so far with 20M API calls served last month.
The project is not yet providing the majority of my income however there's been tremendous and very promising growth!
Shameless plug: Revela Preço, an app to do price surveys (brazilian market)<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.revelapreco" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.revelap...</a><p>Well, not profitable yet, but promising :D
I freelance in building Web Apps for companies so I can build free Web Apps in my free time. ' Guess I love building stuff. Last finished: <a href="https://eddtor.com" rel="nofollow">https://eddtor.com</a>
I run <a href="https://dndemail.com" rel="nofollow">https://dndemail.com</a> -- do not disturb for your gmail.<p>I launched in 2016 and have solid growth. It is the 3rd web business I have launched. My first was in 1998.
i just launched <a href="http://startmydomain.com" rel="nofollow">http://startmydomain.com</a>
as I want to quit the 9 to five grind.<p>The premise of the site is that you can create a coming soon website without any coding or even hosting<p>would love to get some feed back
IMO these two are mutually exclusive:<p>> successful profitable business<p>> provides the majority of the owner's income<p>Building a business takes a lot of time & dedication. It's going to be very challenging to reach long-term stability and profitability if you go into it with your sights so low that you think "this will be successful and I can coast if it makes $100k per year."<p>Play to win.
Heya! Depends what's your definition of "successful", of course, but would like to plug in CJL - job board for blockchain companies.<p>- <a href="https://cryptojobslist.com" rel="nofollow">https://cryptojobslist.com</a><p>- current progress <a href="https://twitter.com/ksaitor/status/968690695031500800" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ksaitor/status/968690695031500800</a><p>- will share revenue figures shortly, but TL;DR — it's ramen profitable<p>Been running it solo and launched in October 2017. Previously did a few other consumer+saas startups with a team, funding, etc — and this simple job board seems to be having way more traction and revenue than other funded projects with fancy apps that I've built before. AMA :)
This article can be useful for you: <a href="https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/86-what-is-a-marketplace-briefly-about-the-popular-topic" rel="nofollow">https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/86-what-is-a-marketplace-bri...</a>
1. Ad scraping business. We scrap ads and expose the bad guys.<p>Let me tell you there are many bad guys injecting bad just because the ad exchanges do not care. Most of them do it because "no one would know". So, we just scrap ads and put them on display.<p>2. We sell a subscription to our service where we charge $200-400 month for access to this data. Many malware researchers, ad agencies, regulators are subscribed to our data set.<p>3. It's a private business, high 5 figure revenue. Scraping cost per customer is $10