Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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.

I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while.<p>Please don&#x27;t ask what my business is. I rather share true numbers, but don&#x27;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 ;)).<p>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):<p>- 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&#x27;s a tendency to want to grab a &quot;bigger audience&quot;. 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.<p>- Start working on something, release a prototype after 2-6 weeks. Don&#x27;t invest months or years in something without users.<p>- 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.<p>- If there are two books I&#x27;d recommend: &quot;Rework&quot; by Basecamp. It helps you to focus on a minimal set of features and think about what&#x27;s truly important. Couple this with &quot;This is Marketing&quot; from Seth Godin, where he explains how traditional marketing is dead and how it&#x27;s important to find a niche. Don&#x27;t read more books, interviews or whatever. Get into a &quot;starter mindset&quot; by reading and then do.<p>- 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.

I develop and sell Cursive (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cursive-ide.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cursive-ide.com</a>), 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&#x27;d be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I&#x27;m constantly amazed by how well Cursive does.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.

I sell carnivorous plants online. It&#x27;s not my main job&#x2F;revenue so it doesn&#x27;t fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job.<p>Here&#x27;s a few things I do that made it &quot;successful&quot;:<p>- Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing.<p>- Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere<p>- Having a good website that works, is well organized and easy to use.<p>- Friendly customer support, I like to talk to my customers as I would talk to a friend (to a certain extend).<p>- Fast shipping after receiving an order, or at least let the customer know when their order will be shipped.<p>- A good logo made by a designer, this has been super helpful for brand-awareness<p>- Good packaging that minimize most damage the plants, with printed plastic labels for each plants (with my logo on them)<p>- Active presence on social media, with good quality picture posts (with my logo on them)<p>- 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.<p>- SEO optimisation so that people can find you on google. I struggle with this because google keeps autocorrecting my name.<p>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&#x27;m talking to a robot.<p>I would say the part that I struggle the most with is staying on schedule and not forgetting about people who order via email&#x2F;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.

My business is in my bio, don&#x27;t want to link it here. Pays about the same as my previous job at Microsoft did, but with a lot less involvement — I haven&#x27;t touched the main code in about a year now. I probably spend about two or three hours a week on customer support, that&#x27;s it, really. No marketing spend, all word-of-mouth and Google.<p>The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn&#x27;t allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5&#x2F;month Stripe plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends, posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It worked, then it didn&#x27;t work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable.<p>About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they loved it, money wasn&#x27;t an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be worth doing it properly.<p>It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (&lt;$100 a phone). Each phone pays for itself in less than a month, server costs are less than $200 a month.<p>Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of running it, and it&#x27;s been almost five years I think.<p>I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my competitors did — instead, I don&#x27;t emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that let me survive this long.

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.<p>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&#x27;t exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers thinks they&#x27;re paying for a team of 6, but it&#x27;s actually just me.<p>My monthly billings last month was 73k USD. I am a tax resident of a tax haven although I do live 3-6 months at a time in a different country.<p>The only advice I&#x27;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 priorities, we chose not to.<p>A lot of people I&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;best performer&quot; while not actually working that hard.

Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom:<p>Starting a business is really hard and it&#x27;s totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pageflows.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pageflows.com</a> and have been living off it full time for a little over a year.<p>The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it&#x27;s not a huge amount of money, but it&#x27;s enough.<p>It&#x27;s a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it&#x27;s I&#x27;m happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any questions you have.

I&#x27;m working on NanaGram (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanagram.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanagram.co</a>). The tagline: Text or email your photos and we&#x27;ll send 4x6 prints to your loved ones.<p>It doesn&#x27;t provide the majority of my income (yet) but by far and away it provides the majority of my life&#x27;s meaning. I haven&#x27;t crossed the mental hurdle of sharing all my numbers publicly yet but let&#x27;s just say it is turning a profit and there are thousands of happy NanaGrammers.<p>I got started on it at my grandfather&#x27;s 94th birthday party when by brother 1-uppped my gift of live lobsters with the gift of &quot;InstaGrandpa.&quot; He prototyped it the night before and asked me to help build it.<p>Working solo is a challenge for many reasons. One thing I did early was automate the customer feedback loops. I set up an automated loop to collect customer reviews (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanagram.co&#x2F;#happy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanagram.co&#x2F;#happy</a>). Collecting feedback from grandparents is a bit tougher so I set up a phone line for them to dial in and leave voicemails (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanagram.co&#x2F;#happynanas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanagram.co&#x2F;#happynanas</a>). I get a couple voicemails and reviews each week and it&#x27;s like maker fuel.<p>Another big challenge is fighting isolation. I like to practice deep work but there&#x27;s a fine line between deep work and isolation. I would&#x27;ve given up a year ago if it weren&#x27;t for the advisor-like support from my brother and my friend Dan. I did YC Startup School last summer and that was huge as well; I remember sharing with the group that I was on the edge of throwing in the towel, then last December MRR grew by over 2X. The next big thing I plan to change in my life is adding weekly volunteering.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;updown.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;updown.io</a> since 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I&#x27;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&#x27;t try to become uber or airbnb.

I run a business called FontPeek (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fontpeek.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fontpeek.com</a>). It doesn&#x27;t provide the majority of my income, but it does provide a meaningful amount and it&#x27;s constantly growing (pretty linearly). It&#x27;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&#x27;s currently costing me nothing to run because Firebase has incredibly generous pricing.<p>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.

Seven years ago I solo-started an automatic time tracker for programmers called WakaTime [1] and launched here on HN [2]. Partly from listening to developers too much, I waited way too long (almost a year) before adding a paid plan, but now it generates more MRR than an SF developer salary not including stock options. Technically I make more from RSUs and stock from past startups as a regular employee, but if I wasn&#x27;t lucky with those then it would be my highest income stream.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com&#x2F;about</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6046227" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6046227</a><p>For anyone thinking it&#x27;s egregiously difficult to start a solo-project: You&#x27;re right, but if you stick with it your persistence will pay off. For solo-products, I think grit is the deciding factor between success and failure.

Started with apps in the early ios and Android days. Made quickly about 300k a year with them. I quit my job as a developer and focused on apps only. They still make roughly 0.5 million a year these days. I bought several real estate in the years after and they give me about 15k monthly in rental income. I did spend 2 years doing almost nothing except traveling and spending lots of time with my kids. Then I co founded a more serious company where I act as the CTO. We got quite some people working for us so I back in normal work life. Work 4 days a week from 10 to 6. I actually enjoy it more than before. Being somehow free of constant thinking about money is a really nice thing though.

I&#x27;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.<p>I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and stay very small, but I wasn&#x27;t able to pull that off. I picked a niche that was too small, and I also didn&#x27;t have the skills to execute very well (especially in marketing, sales, etc.), so growth has been quite slow. So I&#x27;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&#x27;m looking forward to building a small team of 5-10 people.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;earnestcapital.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;earnestcapital.com</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earnestcapital.com&#x2F;shared-earnings-agreement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earnestcapital.com&#x2F;shared-earnings-agreement&#x2F;</a>

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlyusedtesla.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlyusedtesla.com&#x2F;</a> its an online marketplace to buy &#x2F; sell a Used Tesla.<p>I have been living off the income this whole year. This is my bread and butter. I do not have a 9-5.<p>I launched the business with 4 listings in 2016. I live in New York. My main goal is building brand equity.<p>Business Model.<p>Private Seller<p>$199 to list<p>$299 to list with a social boost<p>Dealer: $99-list<p>I do not use cookies. No Tracking. No google adsense.

I always hold up <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinboard.in&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinboard.in&#x2F;</a> as a poster child for a successful one-man shop. It&#x27;s so successful he takes several months off at a time, right now he&#x27;s in HK reporting on the demonstrations.<p>He&#x27;s very generous with sharing his financials on his blog: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pinboard.in&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;i_cant_stop_winning&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pinboard.in&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;i_cant_stop_winning&#x2F;</a>

I run a series of events for people who run agencies. (By agency, I mean creative, marketing, or technology agencies.)<p>Events are a good business to get into as a solo founder. You can book a venue, and you don&#x27;t have to pay until a few weeks before the event. If you haven&#x27;t sold any tickets you can just cancel the venue and walk away.<p>I started Agency Hackers in 2017 and I&#x27;m almost ready to quit my job and focus on it full time.<p>It took me two years to figure out that instead of selling individual tickets to events, I should offer a &quot;membership&quot; option where people can subscribe and just come to every event.<p>Since I started offering membership last month I&#x27;ve signed up 30 agencies – for a MRR of £4,500. Once I hit 50 I will quit my job.<p>To market the events, I don&#x27;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&#x27;re curious: [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reply.io&#x2F;case-study&#x2F;agency-hackers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reply.io&#x2F;case-study&#x2F;agency-hackers&#x2F;</a>]

[1] Mike Carson is an interesting character, he runs a few websites single-handedly [2] park.io being one of the bigger ones. His [1] indie hacker interview is very interesting, as he resists growth and hiring people<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;how-automating-tasks-helped-me-grow-revenue-to-over-125k-mo-73da9c0b51" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;how-automating-tasks-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;park.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;park.io</a>

I have a UK based e-business, I&#x27;ve turned over between £750,000 and now £950,000 over the past four years (ex VAT). (~76% net profit margin)<p>Its just me, I&#x27;m a developer, which meant I could bootstrap the whole thing for zero cost (time not included) but I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m not going to pretend this is not true for me too.<p>-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.<p>-Word of mouth is a huge part of how the product has grown, people like the product and tell their friends&#x2F;family, I spend less than £1500 p&#x2F;m on advertising through the traditional online mediums.<p>- 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<p>- I&#x27;d recommend - Getting real (Basecamp) - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basecamp.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;getting-real" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basecamp.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;getting-real</a>, its got some solid advice<p>- A mentality of always wanting to make the product better, without bloating it, is key.<p>- People always worry about support. It&#x27;s really not a big deal, I&#x27;ve had hundreds of thousands of customers over the years, support contact is low.<p>Happy to answer any questions if people find it useful.

I develop Flowx [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flowx.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flowx.io</a>], an Android weather app. It makes around $2,500 USD&#x2F;month with about $500&#x2F;month in costs excluding my time. It covers about 60% of my total costs including my time which is 40+ hours a week. I cover my remaining costs through contract work. This might not seem like a success but the business allowed us to move to the Rarotonga, Cook Islands from Auckland, New Zealand. Lifestyle-wise and building-a-business-wise, I think it&#x27;s a success.

I sell freemium software that blocks distractions on your computer so that you can focus on doing work. Unlike my competitors, it&#x27;s a one-time payment business model.<p>The idea for my product first came to me when a friend in university had trouble staying focused on writing papers. He was constantly playing World of Warcraft and needed a way to temporarily block himself from playing the game. So I quickly made a little VB.NET app and service that would watch for the game executable and kill the process if it starts. It did the job well enough and he ended up graduating :)<p>At that point, some other students approached me and asked for my little app to help them study. That&#x27;s when, half-way through university (2010), I made a website for my app and had it available for free. I continued to maintain it and over 4 years, added more features including: blocking websites, adding breaks, scheduling, and passwords.<p>In 2014, I split the product into a free and paid tier. It wasn&#x27;t an easy decision, but I was spending a lot of time on it by this point and customer support was also starting to take a serious hit on my personal time. In about two years (2016), I was making more money from the paid product than my well paying government day job. So, I decided to quit my job and work on my business full time.<p>Although I felt it was risky, the alternative was passing up an opportunity many people dreamed of having. I never planned to start a business in the first place and I kind of felt&#x2F;still feel imposter syndrome. For now, I&#x27;m just enjoying my new found freedom and continue to be thankful for my new job. I&#x27;m going to keep it a lifestyle business for now, but I wouldn&#x27;t be opposed to selling it as my exit plan.<p>I&#x27;ve spent (effectively) $0 in advertising since developing it and I&#x27;d say my customers come from organic search, external links, and word-of-mouth.

I own Product Pix (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.proproductpix.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.proproductpix.org</a>). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background.<p>It makes $1300&#x2F;month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I&#x27;m not gonna call it &quot;successful&quot; just yet.<p>How I got started: I do machine learning, and I methodically searched for places where people buy a service transactionally on platforms like Fiverr and that I think can be automated away (or greatly automated with human reviewers in the loop) with state of the art machine learning models. There are hundreds or thousands of such opportunities that individuals can solve on their own.<p>I&#x27;ll be more comfortable giving sage advice once I&#x27;ve crossed the $10K&#x2F;month threshold, but still I&#x27;d say a willingness to try a lot of shit out and get digging on stuff you have 0 familiarity with is mandatory. In this project I&#x27;ve had to learn javascript, frontend, photography, google ads campaign management etc.<p>Another tip I wish someone had told me is, build a pricing page from day one. The temptation to get _some_ signal you&#x27;re useful to people will drive you to offer stuff for free, but that will end up getting you a lot of unwanted attention from people who will never ever pay.

I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mendskin.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mendskin.co</a>) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time.<p>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.<p>But I enjoy it.

I run Sales for Founders (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;salesforfounders.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;salesforfounders.com</a>) - a course where I teach (mainly technical) founders just enough about sales to find their first customers and grow to $10k MRR.<p>Since starting work on the course in May, I’ve been through 3 iterations and made about $40k.<p>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.<p>If you’re thinking about running a course (I was very sceptical at first) or want to hear more, you can check out my recent interview on the IndieHackers.com podcast.

I run a headless browser service called browserless.io. Got started due to lack of a comparable service, and all others seemed more geared for testing.<p>It’s been around two years now, and makes more than any prior engineering job I’ve ever had. You do have a lot of other stresses you might not otherwise have, but you’ll also work a lot less than at a traditional job!<p>I’m working on a few interviews for some sites, which go more into the details, and will post here when they’re done.<p>EDIT: feel free to comment here on anything or email me at joel at browserless dot io

I bootstrapped a digital publishing business to over $200K per year.<p>Started 8 years ago, developed and published our first website for under $250 (I code, which helps). Learned SEO via trial &amp; error, benefiting from the post-Penguin and Panda implosions that kicked a bunch of spam sites out of our target searches. Started putting together a predictive analytics package for investing in digital content, so we have an idea of how content will pull before we create it.<p>After that it was scaling and project management. Which has been a real learning experience, since a lot of publishing basically sucks... many people cranking out the same stuff. Very hard to keep &quot;that special spark&quot; in content at scale.<p>Still have the day job. Digital publishing is an 11 on the hot &#x2F; crazy scale in terms of revenue stability (50% swings in monthly revenue on established sites aren&#x27;t uncommon), so have a reliable pay check &amp; health insurance reduces stress substantially. Plus I enjoy the work, most of the time.<p>One other benefit of having a &quot;cover&quot; day job: it allows you to &quot;stay off the radar&quot; as a small business owner and fairly affluent member of your local society. You&#x27;ve got a socially acceptable answer (&quot;I punch a clock at company X&quot;) and don&#x27;t stand out. Most people have no clue about the true scope and intensity of my side business, which simplifies things...

I run &amp; operate a VPN company.<p>Found a niche that at least 600 people would pay me a monthly amount for, totalling nearly $3k a month. Costs are &lt; $70 a month.<p>Everything is automated so it&#x27;s probably less than an hour a week.<p>It was my <i>learn how to code</i> project that has become my basic income. All the money is funding my secondary project.

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d say most just gave up when they realized they could make more money just getting a job.

Related:<p><i>Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19701783" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19701783</a> 752 points - 6 months ago

I created a SaaS website builder for a small niche market. I&#x27;ve been running it for about 8 years. I gross a bit over $14,000 per month with about $500 in expenses for servers and third-party APIs. I work 1-2 hours per week answering customer support emails. Basically, I automated away my old job as a web designer :)<p>The smartest decision I made was targeting a small niche market that larger businesses wouldn&#x27;t bother with. I often get kind emails from customers thanking me for helping their industry. I kept things simple, didn&#x27;t add features unless I really believed customers needed them, and didn&#x27;t try to generalize the solution. I think those are the main reasons why the product worked.<p>By far the hardest part was&#x2F;is marketing. I&#x27;m still bad at it. I&#x27;ve tried may things. Most failed or were too hard to sustain. Some succeeded, like Facebook ads, but those successes were often hard to recreate. At this point it&#x27;s mostly word of mouth.<p>Working alone can be psychologically challenging. When I have a problem, there&#x27;s no one to help because no one else knows how the platform works. With no one to bounce ideas off of, it&#x27;s easy to get stuck in a rut going round and round the same set of possible solutions. And I really have to monitor myself to ensure that I don&#x27;t get too isolated. This was an issue in the early years, but now I have a routine that gets me up and out and into the world every day. I would strongly advise anyone considering the solo route to carefully consider the social and mental health aspects of working alone.<p>I feel very grateful to my former self for doing the hard work that pays my bills today. And I&#x27;m tremendously grateful for open source tools and resources like Stack Overflow without which I would never have made it this far alone.

I ran a Shopify site selling meme shirts for 3 years.<p>You might recognize classics such as &quot;Legalize 4Loko 2020&quot; and &quot;BREAD&quot; as featured in Elle magazine.<p>All on-demand printing. Order goes through Shopify&#x27;s API to the supply center, order gets fulfilled, shipped. No inventory. Kinda pricey, but zero maintenance. Set and forget.<p>Find the most extremely dank and niche memes possible so you hit the little nugget inside of someone&#x27;s brain that makes them want to spend $15-30 on a t-shirt.<p>A good print would net me somewhere like 300 orders a month. A sweatshirt could go for $50-60. You have options.

I started <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.virtualhere.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.virtualhere.com</a> about 10 years ago, it provides a good income. I developed&#x2F;sell&#x2F;support everything myself. I felt there was a need for this type of product 10 years ago and with cloud computing&#x2F;gaming its become very useful for a lot of use-cases now.

Six and a half years ago I launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.masteringmodernpayments.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.masteringmodernpayments.com&#x2F;</a>, a book to teach people how to integrate Stripe with their Rails app. It generated almost $80k of revenue, mostly front loaded but with a really long tail.<p>Recently I turned off sales because I was feeling more and more guilty about not having time to update it, and now that I work for Stripe updating it involves a layer of approval.<p>Of course, now I work for Stripe so I&#x27;d say it was a success :)

I made <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.golfforecast.co.uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.golfforecast.co.uk</a> - an ML algorithm to predict golf.<p>After 5 years it&#x27;s making enough from subscriptions for me to live off (3K gbp&#x2F;mo). The algorithm is always a work in progress but it&#x27;s seeing consistent returns now so I&#x27;m making money from that too :) plus it makes golf a lot more entertaining.

When I started <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fairpixels.pro" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fairpixels.pro</a> (UX&#x2F;UI Design for B2B Saas Companies) I grew it pretty quickly to a very profitable one-person business. (Not 1 person anymore)<p>The origin story is somewhat organic.<p>- Started as a logo design company<p>- then kept getting requests to help with UI&#x2F;UX Design so I did<p>- then realised the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies<p>- today we&#x27;re still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 companies, an Elon Musk company alongside awesome startups to our client list.<p>&#x2F;&#x2F;Advice: Start with something small. Anything. Don&#x27;t worry too much about how to grow. Then.. Just keep your eyes &amp; ears open. Your customers will point you in the right direction towards bigger pinpoints &amp; thus better growth opportunities. You don&#x27;t always need a ton of traffic. Just start with something small and go from there.

I have a CRM&#x2F;business intelligence product that targets a very specific niche of an industry. I&#x27;m the only employee, although I am currently looking to expand by hiring a sales person and a support person.<p>Here&#x27;s a startup idea I want, by the way. If this exists somebody please tell me:<p>I&#x27;m good at creating products. I&#x27;m a good programmer, I can do design well, I understand marketing well, I can sell things, etc. However, the things I am TERRIBLE at are basically anything involving paperwork. I hate these tasks, and I am terrible at them. I want a company that I can hire that will take care of all of my backoffice&#x2F;HR tasks. So:<p>-An accountant.<p>-A lawyer.<p>-An HR person who can deal with compliance around hiring and firing staff.<p>Many of the aspects of software businesses can be looked at services, and fit well into an engineering mindset. Hosting is from digital ocean, costs $f00, and gets mentally compartmentalized. I don&#x27;t care very much about how DA deals with routing, provisioning their own resources, etc. I tell them in abstract terms the things I want, and they provide them in a package for me to consume. Twilio does similar things for me for telephony. Coworking spaces do this for physical offices.<p>I want more of that for more traditional parts of business. Essentially I want to hire a controller in the cloud (or at least the way that controllers have been used at various companies I have worked at in the past). IF this exists, please reply with the name of the company! Maybe this means this is something I should start myself.

&quot;I sell onions on the internet&quot; was posted 6 months back: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19728132" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19728132</a>

I launched ToDesktop back in April, I&#x27;m ramen profitable and I&#x27;m working on it full-time.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;m seeing good growth. Most of my growth now is coming from organic search engine traffic. I&#x27;ve posted some high-leverage page speed + SEO tips on Indie Hackers here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;marketing-tools-are-damaging-your-seo-and-how-to-fix-it-ed6d6d7bb4?commentId=-LnHh1mMxpDTsMUkhf2J" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;marketing-tools-are-damagi...</a><p>I&#x27;m a product&#x2F;tech person with some graphic design experience but I was really weak on sales&#x2F;marketing before I started working on ToDesktop. If you&#x27;re like me (strong on tech&#x2F;product, weak on sales&#x2F;marketing) then I would highly recommend Julian Shapiro&#x27;s guide on growth marketing. It&#x27;s zero-fluff and written by someone with a technical mindset: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.julian.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;growth&#x2F;intro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.julian.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;growth&#x2F;intro</a><p>A one-person business is tough, it&#x27;s lonely at times. It can also be tough to work on the things you <i>should</i> be working on (as opposed to the things you <i>want</i> to 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. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DaveJ&#x2F;status&#x2F;1167386564240056321" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DaveJ&#x2F;status&#x2F;1167386564240056321</a><p>Self-promo for those interested: ToDesktop automatically creates a desktop app from any web app. It&#x27;s like Electron-as-a-Service with code signing, installer, auto-updates, app notarization taken care of. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.todesktop.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.todesktop.com&#x2F;</a>

I run an edtech platform that helps users improve their analytical skills and prepare them for technical interviews. It&#x27;s somewhat niche in that it&#x27;s a platform focused on beginner marketing analytics and data science.<p>I launched it 2 years ago, mainly to help me teach a university class more effectively (I wanted something easy for non-technical beginners to learn). I spend about 5-10 hrs a week bouncing around developing and marketing. I make enough to hire a part-time developer that helps me with engineering. Otherwise, I do everything else myself.<p>The toughest part for me is marketing. Currently, I do a lot of writing on Medium to talk about the industry and will include a short call out to my platform at the end. I&#x27;ve tried other marketing channels like Youtube and Google ads but haven&#x27;t found anything that beats writing articles.<p>While the platform is only 2 years old, I make almost 6 figures in revenue and it keeps growing linearly. My ultimate goal is to passively have this income take over my professional salary so that I can have financial freedom. I plan to continue to work, teach, and run this side business because I love all the different aspects that each venture provides me.

I&#x27;m a resume writer that also provides career consultation and job search strategy sessions, LinkedIn and cover letter writing, executive bios, etc. I work from home, am able to set my own schedule and spend time with my kids, and do quite well financially with very little overhead.<p>I&#x27;ve worked with a number of HN readers over the years.

I have been running <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sanitycheck.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sanitycheck.io</a> - 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.<p>It&#x27;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.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;IndieHackers.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;IndieHackers.com</a>, which was inspired by threads like this one on HN. I&#x27;ve interviewed hundreds of people running successful one-person SaaS businesses, and many thousands more have created pages for their products here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;products" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;products</a><p>Just a small handful of my favorites:<p>- Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $2900&#x2F;month (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;35QXFhY" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;35QXFhY</a>). Competing with Google Analytics and tons of well-funded competitors isn&#x27;t easy, but Adriaan&#x27;s focus on privacy and simplicity has a strong appeal.<p>- Maker Mind by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, making $800&#x2F;month (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;31FYK97" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;31FYK97</a>). She&#x27;s a neuroscience student and ex-Googler who writes fascinating articles about the intersection of neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and productivity.<p>- Makerpad by Ben Tossell, making $24000&#x2F;month (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2JeIEg9" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2JeIEg9</a>). Makerpad helps non-developers build complex apps where you&#x27;d typically expect developers to be required. My favorite thing about Ben is that he basically refuses to run a business that&#x27;s not 100% enjoyable. He&#x27;s shut down a working company or two just because the business model wasn&#x27;t shaping up to be something he was excited about in the long run.<p>- Key Values by Lynne Tye, making $25000&#x2F;month (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.keyvalues.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.keyvalues.com</a>). 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.<p>- Carrd by @ajlkn, making over $30000&#x2F;month (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carrd.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carrd.co</a>). Card is a one-page site builder. AJ&#x27;s an amazing developer&#x2F;designer combo with over a decade of experience building one-page website templates and builders. I can&#x27;t name any web apps I&#x27;ve found easier to use and more polished than Carrd, so it&#x27;s not surprising AJ has many thousands of paying customers.<p>- Starter Story by Pat Walls, making $7100&#x2F;month (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;35XdALQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;35XdALQ</a>). 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&#x27;t get an advertising model to work as a solo founder, but it&#x27;s actually quite great if you&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s late so I&#x27;ll stop here, but there are many thousands more.<p>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&#x27;t have worked, because you couldn&#x27;t have found critical mass in just your local environment. Plus it&#x27;s cheaper and easier than ever to build and host your own apps.<p>I think this is the future, and 10 years from now we&#x27;ll see a staggering number of people (mostly devs) running their own one-person businesses instead of working jobs.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;encycolorpedia.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;encycolorpedia.com&#x2F;</a> - its origins are from a &quot;JavaScript as CSS&quot; library I was developing - there were&#x2F;are superior projects available, so ultimately I used the colour manipulation code to produce the site. The idea was to take a seed colour 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.<p>It&#x27;s not massively profitable (it&#x27;s a side gig), I&#x27;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 &#x2F; possibly rebrand paints, but had zero responses.

I&#x27;m running <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;remoteleaf.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;remoteleaf.com</a> - Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs based on your individual skill preferences &amp; location. We source best remote jobs from over 20+ job boards and tons of individual company hiring pages.

I created PartsBox (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;partsbox.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;partsbox.io&#x2F;</a>) and I&#x27;m quite happy running it. It&#x27;s a tool for companies building electronics (also available for free for hobbyists&#x2F;makers). The business was (and is) a &quot;freedom project&quot; 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.<p>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 &quot;toxic customers&quot;.<p>The bad thing about running a solo-founder business is the stress and anxiety. These are difficult to deal with.

As someone who&#x27;s been hacking away at his &quot;boring&quot;, one-man company for a few months (after the 3 year old is in bed, so only about two hours a night, and only some nights) and has begun hitting those initial slumps, this is very inspiring<p>Thanks for posting, and thanks to all who have commented with their success stories.

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&#x27;t that many online shops selling low cost bath products in the UK.<p>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.<p>It never made enough money for <i>me</i> to 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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;ve done) as I create each element of it, once again as a learning exercise using more modern tools&#x2F;platforms.<p>--<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jaruzel.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jaruzel.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg</a>

I have a couple of website I monetize through Adsense. It all started in 2009 (10 years ago) when my PhD candidate salary was not enough to make a living. I started earning around 300€ after six months. I was extremely happy with that as it gave me a breath of fresh air. I managed to make around 1500€ after a year and a half. I quit my job once it reached 2000€ and reached 3000€ after a year. All traffic was coming from google search and was organic. I was focusing on ideas requiring very little update to the websites content.<p>That said, it is very difficult to run a one-person business working from home. You don&#x27;t have colleagues, people to discucss with, people to ask when you have questions, or to learn from.<p>I was living in France by then and I decided to go back to my home country as I would live much better there with that income. I started working as an assistant professor (30% of my time) and hired 2 developers to grow the business. That didn&#x27;t scale well as the success came from my ability of being fast developer, good in SEO while always trying new website ideas.<p>I ended up again with a one-person business. But revenues are dropping and I find it harder and harder to be motivated to continue working on my websites. So now I work nearly 0 hour a week on my website and I am fully dedicated to a corporate job (not in academia anymore) even though I make equal money from both jobs.<p>If I can have an advice : try not to quit your day job. Work is not only about money. It is also about having social life, a career and a common goal to achieve with you co-workers. Working in a good company keeps you up with new technologies and trends. Running a one-person online business can be psychologically challenging. And once you earn enough money, the work to do can be become boring as no new challenges are there.

My former one-person online biz (2013) is now 10 people - we run Amazon end-to-end ops for a few large brands and manage ~100k SKUs -- basically the work is all operations research + grunt work. We do mid eight digits in revenue.<p>A friend of a friend was the COO of a brand, spent a couple mil to position themselves online strategically, but that team couldn&#x27;t deliver results. As a grad student in ML I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues, SUPost (school-centric CL basically), and eBay, so I ended up being rather saavy at ecommerce. I offered to help out their store, then took it over when I got some initial results.<p>Ironically I think from a pure EV standpoint I shoulda stayed with my ML degree - my friends in the same cohort are averaging a mil a year in combined salary + bigcorp options. There were a lot of heartache and sleepless nights associated with running a company, and looking back honestly I would&#x27;ve had a more peaceful life toeing the 9-5.<p>=====<p>I have a few one-person side projects right now concurrently that are providing five-digit revenue that are hard for me to scale, but are enjoyable for me to do:<p>1. Domain expert in a hobbyist niche with high gatekeeping (skill and&#x2F;or money) - I create a couple high quality content a year and make residuals off affiliate fees.<p>2. I flip small businesses in a very specific niche of ecommerce when they don&#x27;t layer into my big business.<p>Note: this seems mildly prolific but honestly I have between 2-5 ideas a year of which I try to execute on 1-2 of them. I think of them as cognitive surplus, &quot;Art projects for Fun and Profit-TM&quot;. Most ideas end up not working out, so the payoff really has to be about the process, not the result.

I&#x27;m doing pretty well selling a WordPress plugin, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mediacloud.press&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mediacloud.press&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s an equal mix of rewarding and frustrating. It&#x27;s a lot more work than you&#x27;d expect and now I&#x27;ve a deep understanding of why support tools are as obtuse as they are.<p>It&#x27;s generating enough income that&#x27;s livable and freeing me up to focus on other related projects. I&#x27;m going to be launching a SAAS version of the plugin later this year.

I&#x27;ve been running <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keygen.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keygen.sh</a> by myself for a little over 3 years. It currently makes $5.3k MRR. Still a side gig, but it&#x27;s getting there.

I am the solo founder of a crowdsourcing business. We are into audio&#x2F;video transcription. I&#x27;ve been at it since 2008, fully bootstrapped. I tried very hard to convert it into a high growth startup. I even got called for an YC interview in 2016, but didn&#x27;t make it. I have lost a lot of money over the years on experiments which didn&#x27;t work. I didn&#x27;t get rich but I make enough to beat the market rate salary.<p>Last year, I finally decided to treat it as a lifestyle business and just focus on a niche market. We are never gonna be a unicorn, but I think we&#x27;ll still be in business 10 years from now. Looking forward to the 2029 thread!<p>Here&#x27;s my post on the 2014 thread. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7368727" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7368727</a>

This thread is pure magic. I love the grit and creativity of these stories. There&#x27;s been some talk of survivorship bias. I can relate to both sides of that. About 15 years ago I ran an online shop selling auto accessories. I did that for about 5 years and made a decent living with about 10 hours of work per week (more during the holiday season). The business folded as shipping expenses and competition rose around 2008. (In my downfall story, I like to ignore the fact that I worked 10 hours per week rather than expand the business). My successful business started due to a combination of ability and luck. I &#x27;lucked&#x27; into a situation where I had a B2B sales position (commission only) and I was able to sell products to my own website. In that case, I took a bad job and had the ability to develop it into an online business. Since then I have launched a number of largely unsuccessful online businesses. I&#x27;ve done paper mache for hire, crawl space &#x27;clamps&#x27;, an online game, a video aggregation service, several blogs, an android todo list app, and a few machinery based things that never rose to the level of &#x27;fail&#x27; (those ended in the &quot;didn&#x27;t really try&quot; phase). Currently, I have a new project that I am trying to focus into a market at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gasket.appspot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gasket.appspot.com</a>. The reason I bring up survivorship bias here is to point out that the bias doesn&#x27;t really matter. In aggregate the solo businesses which succeed are creative applications of an uncommon skill. Based on this thread those skills are currently ML and data aggregation. In 2002 those skills were web development and online ad purchasing. Businesses fail because either the idea is meh (ie paper mache for hire) or the creator doesn&#x27;t bake in the feedback mechanisms they need to keep going (ie, requiring payment for an online game). Other people&#x27;s failure does not shed any useful light on what you should try yourself (unless you want to start an online business creating customer paper mache; don&#x27;t do that, it&#x27;s a dumb idea [unless it works]).

I worked with a client recently who ran a successful site comparing products in a very popular and lucrative industry. His affiliate income was in the high six figures annually. He runs the entire business by himself<p>Personally, it might not be completely successful yet, but I started a music blog a while back (don&#x27;t want to share the URL) just to test some SEO strategies. It&#x27;s pulling in low four figures every month with very little work on my part.

Ghostnote is a contextual notes and todo app. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghostnoteapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghostnoteapp.com</a> It is profitable but not enough to live of when you have a wife and too kids and live in new york. I build it because i needed it myself.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;picojump.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;picojump.com</a> which I started this year.<p>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&#x27;s criteria, it&#x27;s not [yet] providing enough to live off.

I developed Semester Planner (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semesterplanner.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semesterplanner.com</a>) which is what helped me pay for college. It is a online student planner for college students that helps them keep tracks of their classes, notes, assignments, and documents.<p>I am currently working on Enqode (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enqode.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enqode.io&#x2F;</a>) which is platform that takes a hand-drawn wireframe and converts it into a design file or code.<p>I would say that for any successful business requires a great deal of work to be done. On the surface it will appear that it is easy running such businesses but, in reality it is very difficult especially at scale.

It doesn&#x27;t exactly qualify as a one-man business, but I&#x27;m running a few side projects bringing around $500&#x2F;month:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;batgrowth.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;batgrowth.com</a>: A website monitoring the growth of The Brave browser &#x2F; Basic Attention Token, in terms of publishers adoption (Fun fact: Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, tweeted about the site)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ethereum-cours.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ethereum-cours.com</a>: A CMC clone built mainly for fun, bringing some decent referral revenue<p>- My tech blog<p>I&#x27;ve built many more side projects, most were earning $0&#x2F;month after a few months, but I&#x27;ve also sold 2 side projects, so overall it&#x27;s worth the effort

I turned a software development blog into a profit-generating asset in 2 years.<p>I then used it to market my skills as a Software developer and it helped me gained employment.<p>I highly recommend any developer to start a blog, and just see where it takes you.<p>My blog is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeroequalsfalse.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeroequalsfalse.com</a>

I run a blog to book service (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixxibook.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixxibook.com</a>) that while physical product, non-SaaS and firmly B2C has proved to be both low in support and reasonably profitable.<p>Sold our first book about a year ago and has grown steadily to the point where it could replace my day job. I&#x27;ve done blissfully little marketing beyond buying ads. Currently spend less than 1 day per week on it and during summer holidays I was able to keep it running from my phone with irregular connectivity.

I read an interesting article somewhere about Listen notes (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;</a>), which is owned and run by one person. Not sure how profitable it is, but you can get in touch with them to gain more info.

I recently sunsetted it (as in - no longer accepting payments for it), but over 7 years I was running AppCodes.com.<p>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 :,)<p>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 $250k over the span of the few years (which is a very decent salary in Poland).<p>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”.<p>I also made a few important decisions over it’s lifespan:<p>- 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)<p>- 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-&gt;paid funnel right can be challenging, and pushes the site into serving bigger clients really, not indie devs<p>- 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<p>- 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 :)<p>- 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<p>- 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<p>All in all, it was an amazing ride, that really got me off the ground as an antrepereneur, and I really hope provided a lot of value to the few thousands of paid users that passed through it over the years<p>(written on mobile, sorry for formatting)

Howdy! I run a business teaching people how to build their own software business using JavaScript: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleverbeagle.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleverbeagle.com</a>.<p>I got started doing it as a fluke of writing tutorials and then realizing a pattern around people using the OSS tools I made to help me write the tutorials (people were using the tools to build their apps and then coming to me for help and I realized &quot;oh hey, this is a business!&quot;).

For the last 9+ years I&#x27;ve worked on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scanii.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scanii.com</a>, a content identification service (think of it as the unix file command on steroids wrapped around an easy to use API). Started with a real MVP hacked on a weekend (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20101209005314&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scanii.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20101209005314&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scanii.com...</a>) after identifying the need on a day job I had a long time ago. With 0 marketing and sales it took a while to start gaining traction but I always knew that we were solving a real problem with a good and fair-priced product. Nowadays it’s big enough to be classified as a lifestyle business and that’s all right by me.

Does anyone know where someone can buy a business? I&#x27;ve seen some spammy posts when googling for how-tos but curious if anyone has bought one and whether it worked out?

I make websites for a niche market where I found that they often use freelancers and the bar was set pretty low for customer service and expectations. I&#x27;ve been doing this since mid 2016. Over the past 18 months I got so busy that I&#x27;ve started hiring people to do specific jobs. So I&#x27;m in this transition from one man band to &#x27;real&#x27; agency. The majority of the money comes from providing ongoing service agreements after we finish the website. For 2019 I&#x27;ll close around $800,000 which is about a 90% revenue growth over 2018. I&#x27;ll draw a salary of $200,000. I&#x27;ve got some good prospects lined up for 2020 and believe I&#x27;ll get up to $1.1m

Not sure it qualifies as a solo business but I run a tech blog that not only helped me to get my current job but also side gigs and contracts. Besides that I was contacted by tech companies to write paid guest posts for them. Recently a few companies offers me percentage of amount prompting their products via posts. One of them helping me to earn good referral amount. So far gave them 30+ customers in 2-3 months. They are web scraping service. I am thinking to contact a few companies myself in a near future.<p>My blog URL is: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.adnansiddiqi.me" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.adnansiddiqi.me</a>

Last year i have launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visalist.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visalist.io</a> which helps people find where they can travel with your passport tension free. Im currently making $2500 per month and it&#x27;s going to cross $4000 hopefully. My revenue is from adsense, pro subscription, iVisa affiliate and Skyscanner affiliate. Most of traffic is organic. I stared visa list as i found contradicting, confusing and outdated information about visas. So i tried to solve my own problem and it turns out there more than 300k users with similar problem every month.

I teach mandolin and violin lessons online, and sell related products <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sweetmusicstudio.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sweetmusicstudio.net</a>. I make a modest income and profit.

I know a successful two-person online cloud provider. One person is hard unless it&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m running <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makeplans.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makeplans.net</a>. SaaS online appointment booking. Bootstrapped and profitable.<p>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&#x27;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&#x2F;marketing isn&#x27;t my expertise (I&#x27;m a tech&#x2F;product dude).

My friend recently sold his lead generation business for around 5m GBP. It was making around 140k a month. I built the website and did some maintenance but was basically just him.

I ran a business buying products wholesale and selling on Amazon. Did about 2 million in sales last year at around 20% margins.<p>We were then attacked by competition and shut down, leading us to sue in federal court. See Thimes Solutions Inc v Tp-link et al<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courtlistener.com&#x2F;docket&#x2F;15690011&#x2F;thimes-solutions-inc-v-tp-link-usa-corporation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courtlistener.com&#x2F;docket&#x2F;15690011&#x2F;thimes-solutio...</a>

You could say I run an import business. I import mainly Chinese cellphones and gagdets that are not officially distributed in my country and even after taxes I can sell them at an attractive price via Facebook marketplace and a local equivalent to Craigslist. I make twice what I make in my day job as an engineer. I&#x27;m aware that one day I might not be able to continue (regulations, taxing, etc) so I&#x27;m not going too crazy about it.

Waiting for a post entitled &quot;unsuccesful one-person online businesses&quot;

I ran an online consultancy in 2014 - 2015 for grad school applications, between the time I applied and started school (for almost a year). Zero operational expenses, as I ran the whole thing as a Facebook page with a Gmail id. This was in India, and I made about 800-1000 USD a month. Only reason to close it was I couldn&#x27;t give it time once grad school started.

To be successful as an one person online business maker you need loads of self motivation &amp; some self control over procrastination.<p>If you&#x27;re spending alot of time on your own, managing &amp; building up your start up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...&amp; good ambient music on in the background ;-]

I ran many different websites. I just enjoy development and new ideas. My best profitable website is a Gematria Calculator <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.germatrix.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.germatrix.org</a> which I also have in Hebrew <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimatria.co.il&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimatria.co.il&#x2F;</a>. But the main idea is combining many many different ideas and website, like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.understandmydreams.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.understandmydreams.com</a> (also in Hebrew <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;he.understandmydreams.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;he.understandmydreams.com</a>) and more... you can see here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c2kb.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c2kb.com</a>

I run SideProjectors (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com</a>) - a market place for indie entrepreneurs to buy and sell their online businesses, projects etc.<p>I created it in 2014, neglected it for awhile, and it was running on its own. It started to form a little community around it, so I finally got myself motivated to re-design this year.<p>It never made any money up until quite recently through some affiliate marketing channels, so it&#x27;s not huge, but it covers the operating cost, which is very small.<p>For those who are looking to get into running your own little projects, come and have a look around. If you want to sell your projects and move on, then well, I&#x27;m happy to host your project for sale! :)

I develop and sell a Q&amp;A platform since 2017 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scoold.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scoold.com</a>). It started off as Stack Overflow clone but now it has features which are quite niche and missing from SO like geolocation and spaces for teams. The project is open source but has a Pro version which generates around 4000€ per month. I spend around 30% of my work day on support and emails. The rest of the day I fix issues and develop new features. I&#x27;m a solo developer and work full time on the project. Accounting &amp; legal is handled by an external company. I operate as a limited company within the EU.

I am loving this threading as I am currently a student whos looking into new ideas to venture into. Instead of working corporate jobs I rather works as A contractor or build a saas business to remain sustain.<p>Any Ideas or help would be highly appreciated

I&#x27;ve recently described my road to $10k profit from a bootstraped side project <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pawelurbanek.com&#x2F;side-project-profit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pawelurbanek.com&#x2F;side-project-profit</a>

I&#x27;ve recently moved to somewhere where it&#x27;s much cheaper to live (Europe -&gt; Latin America) and I&#x27;m creating products that scratch my own itch.<p>In a couple of months it&#x27;s already paying for my expenses.<p>For now I&#x27;m fixing things that frustrate me while I work on my Mac (managing windows, tracking all my devices).<p>I have a long list of things I&#x27;d like to see fixed in products I use and products I&#x27;d like to see come to life, so I&#x27;m planning to spend this year working on that.<p>Site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fadel.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fadel.io&#x2F;</a>

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.checkbot.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.checkbot.io</a> myself. :) It&#x27;s a paid Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security best practices.<p>While working as a web developer, I found myself having to do a lot of manual checks or write scripts to test if new pages or changes to existing pages were following a long list of web best practices. I eventually wrapped up all this knowledge and automation into a finish product that others have found useful.

I&#x27;ve been running docsapp.io, a SaaS for documentation hub. It is growing and profitable but not a lot. I work between 1-8 hours per month, mostly development and little support.

I run Codepip (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepip.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepip.com</a>), coding games for learning web dev.<p>Started out making a single game as a weekend project, it got a good reception, so there was obvious demand for learning to code in this interactive way. Have since branched out to more games covering different HTML, CSS, and JS topics with more coming. It&#x27;s continued as a one-person operation, for the time being.

I have been building <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flowboardpro.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flowboardpro.com</a> - It is an artist management software for agencies. I went full-time on it in April of this year &amp; 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&#x27;m wrapping up all the feature development to focus on the marketing side of it.

Still the same answer, I develop the firewall app Radio Silence (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radiosilenceapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;radiosilenceapp.com</a>) for macOS.<p>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.

Am running a website <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nmmapper.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nmmapper.com&#x2F;</a> that offers Pentesting tools Most of this pentesting tools are being moved from Kali linux to used online without installing Kali linux. This is an interesting project in less than a year I had over 160+ active years. this is a one man work. And drive the traffic from organic search.

I&#x27;m running <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;remoteleaf.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;remoteleaf.com</a><p>- Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs that are made for you from about 20+ job boards &amp; 100+ company pages.<p>- Using filters based on your skill preferences &amp; location, Remote leaf would be able to know that job that befits you and send you job postings daily or weekly to your inbox.

I created Mascot Gaming Logo Maker (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mascotlogomaker.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mascotlogomaker.com&#x2F;</a>). It&#x27;s a tool that allows you to create a gaming logo for your esports team. As of now I have private beta testers using it and while it&#x27;s not enough to live on its awesome to help a community I care for gg.

I started a SaaS business with 2 friends maybe 5 years ago, it generates $150,000&#x2F;mo in profit. Initially we worked on it almost full time for a year but now we spend together maybe 2 hours a month on it now.<p>We charge SMBs less than $10&#x2F;mo and have over 80k paying customers. We kind of hit the equilibrium between churn and new users so it may grow a little more but we have likely peaked.<p>AMA

I&#x27;ve run a niche ecommerce website by myself for 10+ years as my primary income. It&#x27;s down to about 5-15 hours of work per week. I&#x27;m looking to sell if anyone is interested. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21118095" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21118095</a>

How are people starting and maintaining these side projects and still finding the time to satisfy human needs? I&#x27;m mid to late 20s, single, and there&#x27;s no way I could spend the time whilst also having a robust social life.<p>I would like to know a sampling of age or status. Are people with the successful side projects fairly settled down?

1. The first two years of Pocket (getpocket.com) was a one-person business.<p>2. The first four years of Plenty Of Fish (POF.com) was a one-person business. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codecondo.com&#x2F;plenty-of-fish-adsense-earnings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codecondo.com&#x2F;plenty-of-fish-adsense-earnings&#x2F;</a><p>3. Overcast (overcast.fm)<p>4. stratechery.com

My definition of &quot;Success&quot; at this point (launched 4 apps earlier never tried to generate revenue) is generating revenue. Launched couple of months back - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;extracttable.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;extracttable.com</a> adding paid clients at an average of 3-4 per week.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tardis.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tardis.dev</a> - tick-level cryptocurrency market data API. It&#x27;s profitable and I&#x27;m working full time on it for almost a year now. Released it in August, so there&#x27;s nothing statistically significant regarding profits.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;</a> is a great source for this sort of question. They provide various filtering mechanisms as well such as revenue, number of employees, business model, location, etc.

While it&#x27;s not proving the majority of my income, I&#x27;ve been growing BannerJS for a couple of months from a side project for some of my own sites into some nice income on the side.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bannerjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bannerjs.com</a>

I have a niche blog yielding £10,000+ per month in affiliate marketing, ads, and own info products. Mostly SEO-based and paying experts to write for it.<p>Working on two other projects — one&#x27;s a hobby, and one&#x27;s a SaaS that&#x27;s scratching my own itch.

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypley.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypley.com</a> &#x2F; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypley.com.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypley.com.au&#x2F;</a> by myself. Was with a co-founder.

I run a data analysis bot that looks for patterns which occur prior to a price breaktrough on Telegram.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t.me&#x2F;BitAssist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t.me&#x2F;BitAssist</a><p>I monetize via a subscription-based model.

I am running <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mysalesteam.landen.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mysalesteam.landen.co</a>, where startups can simply outsource their sales team or outbound calling process.

These are always fun threads, thanks to those who share their experiences.

I would&#x27;ve thought the poster child for this would be tarsnap.com. In any case it isn&#x27;t really a one person business anymore, I see Colin&#x27;s brother provide support from time to time.

I run a network of newsletters the first one is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trendslates.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trendslates.substack.com</a>

Heard some friends do dropshipping on places like Amazon or Shopify, although I can&#x27;t attest to the validity&#x2F;how successful it actually is.

I heard levels.io (twitter.com&#x2F;levelsio) makes like $50,000 per month off of Nomad List, and I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s a one-person thing.

Thought i&#x27;d flag that threads like these with insightful comments is what makes HN my favourite online community

I run a Shopify store selling customized holiday gift wrap. So far it&#x27;s been fairly lucrative. Makegiftwrap.com

Not me, but Sourcehut seems to be doing okay so far.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcehut.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-financial-report&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcehut.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-fina...</a><p>Drew did some Q&amp;A on Lobsters about it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobste.rs&#x2F;s&#x2F;r41yfm&#x2F;sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_report" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobste.rs&#x2F;s&#x2F;r41yfm&#x2F;sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_repor...</a><p>Drew wants to run a business completely on free software and for free software, and he seems to be doing it.

I think my first million podcast has a lot of them who created 6-7 figure businesses mostly on their own

I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dailytweetalerts.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dailytweetalerts.com</a> , no subscribers and I have no idea how to monetize it. I made it basically to scratch my itch.

Just wonder how you guys got the idea? Any Sharing?

I&#x27;m guessing many Youtubers &#x2F; Instagrammers would qualify.

how come nobody has mentioned pinboard.in ?

what is the name of the website ?

what is the name of the website?

I&#x27;ve been working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fileinbox.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fileinbox.com</a> full time for about the last five years. It&#x27;s been pretty consistently making about $4k&#x2F;month (I haven&#x27;t been spending much money, so don&#x27;t need a lot to go full time), and recently focusing more on marketing has bumped it up to $6.5k MRR and growing. It&#x27;s amazing. I get to work on whatever I want, I get to take as much time off as I want whenever I want, and I&#x27;ve never felt like I wasn&#x27;t doing meaningful work.<p>This business has been a huge source of security in my life that&#x27;s freed up a bunch of time for me to focus on more meaningful life improvements, like diving into hobbies (outdoor climbing, improv and standup comedy, musical theatre, travel, and other more fleeting passions) and optimizing wellness (sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships). I think it&#x27;s the best possible way to make money.<p>I got started by stumbling on patio11&#x27;s side-project-turned-full-time-business Bingo Card Creator. I remember reading about how he was able to quit his shitty job and just work on his Rails app that generated bingo cards and thinking &quot;well shoot, I could do that.&quot;<p>I saw that Patrick was in a community of people doing a similar thing that all go to the same conference: Microconf. Tickets were pricy for me right out of college (I think they were around $800 at the time), but I promised myself I&#x27;d buy a ticket with my first $800 in profit so I could fly out and thank him in person.<p>I had a high level game plan for how I was going to be working on a side project like Bingo Card Creator while I was working as a software developer. Part of that plan was needing to figure out how to accept credit card payments online. I found Stripe and thought it was the coolest API ever, so I picked up one of the side projects I&#x27;d made in college that had a bunch of people bugging me with emails asking for new features. I implemented the features, but added some extra code that put them behind a paywall. They&#x27;d have to pay me to use features I&#x27;d already coded, the fools! Bwahaha.<p>I was pretty surprised when—the same week I was finalizing my very first Real Job out of college—that side project started making $300&#x2F;day. I thought it was a fluke, but it kept rolling in. I didn&#x27;t do any marketing or have a business plan or know who my customers were. I&#x27;d built a thing for myself and other people apparently wanted it too.<p>I bought my microconf ticket three weeks later. Patrick and I have been friends since :)<p>My path is totally not the route I&#x27;d recommend. I think I got pretty lucky with stumbling on product market fit. If you&#x27;re reading this and are interested in doing something similar, I&#x27;ve learned a lot more about what I did accidentally right from taking notes on all the Microconf talks[1] and chatting with more people in the Microconf community that have made similar businesses. I&#x27;d love to help coach you through how to build one of these puppies for yourself! The classic mistake I see people making is obsessing over an idea instead of a group of people with a problem you can help solve. Your idea almost doesn&#x27;t matter at all and it&#x27;s probably not even a good idea. Focus on who you&#x27;re helping and the things they complain about instead.<p>PS: I go into a little more detail about how I got started on Episode 23 of the OK Productive Podcast[2].<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microconf.gen.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microconf.gen.co</a> 2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;okproductive.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;023-3-hat-productivity-with-christian-genco" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;okproductive.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;023-3-hat-productivity-wit...</a>

For those interested in the topic Paul Jarvis has a quickish read on the topic of &quot;Company of one&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;aw&#x2F;d&#x2F;B07FQ2PFNN&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;aw&#x2F;d&#x2F;B07FQ2PFNN&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pjrvs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pjrvs.com&#x2F;</a><p>I take it&#x27;s probably a roundup of his newsletter but I found the book half way decent with mostly fresh insights that is, it wasn&#x27;t heavily recycled compared to most books on this sort of thing.

Start-up and entrepreneurial related questions like these don’t get asked enough here. Thank you

I need enlightenment

Good