This question was asked 3 years ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535</a>) by mdoliwa, and I'm curious what it looks nowadays.<p>> 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.
Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :)<p>It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance.<p>The conventional wisdom is that devs won't pay for software (especially code!), but I've found it to be the opposite. There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.<p>[0] <a href="https://divjoy.com" rel="nofollow">https://divjoy.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2019-grant-recipients/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...</a>
I am in my 21st year of running a service that places bids the last few seconds on eBay. I am the sole employee and I outsource all of the heavy lifting. I have been doing the four hour work week since Tim Ferriss was in middle school. My house and farm in the Seattle area are both fully paid for. It allowed me to enjoy my children as they grew up and to afford serious medical bills (two of them are handicapped). It also allowed me to buy housing for several relatives, study constantly, and do a lot of pro bono work. It also allowed me to make some very expensive mistakes, but we were always careful enough not to do things that were fatal to our finances. It’s been an amazing set of experiences.
I license a fully automated UV unwrapping tool at MinistryOfFlat.com . UV mapping is the task of unwrapping a 3D model to a flat surface in order to put textures on it. Ive been at it for about 3 years, and last year I made 7 figures. I do sell directly to 3D artists. You probably know some VFX companies and game companies that have licensed my tool.<p>I make a good amount from people coming to the web site, but the majority is made licensing the technology to various companies. The online sales are mostly there to spread the word, and gather user feedback.<p>UV mapping is a very difficult problem mostly because artist have very specific ideas of what constitutes good UV mapping and it doesn't conform to any simple heuristics. Its about a megabyte of C code without any dependencies, and that makes very attractive to licensees.
<a href="https://pageflows.com" rel="nofollow">https://pageflows.com</a> has been paying my bills for a couple of years now<p>To give you an idea of revenue, it’s about as much as I’d be getting paid as a junior-mid developer in London and requires a day or two of work a week unless I’m adding a new feature, redesigning etc.<p><a href="https://screenjar.com" rel="nofollow">https://screenjar.com</a> is also making a small amount of revenue, but nothing meaningful yet.
I run BeeLine Reader, [1] which launched on HN years ago. [2]<p>BeeLine makes reading on screen easier and faster. At first, most of the revenue came from B2C mobile apps and browser plugins, but in 2020 it hit a tipping point and most of the revenue now comes from B2B technology licensing.<p>Blackboard recently adopted the BeeLine technology, and there are several other large education platforms that are planning to adopt in 2021.<p>Licensing revenue is uncommon for startups, but it's nice because it's very high margin. I actually used to be a lawyer, so I can keep the main licensing cost (legal fees) under control.<p>1: <a href="http://www.beelinereader.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.beelinereader.com</a><p>2: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784</a>
I develop Cursive - <a href="https://cursive-ide.com" rel="nofollow">https://cursive-ide.com</a>, a plugin for Clojure development in IntelliJ. I started working on it seriously in 2014, started selling it in 2015 after about 2 years in beta (during which time I had a daughter) and it has provided all my income since then. The sales are more than my salary + bonus (but less than total comp) at my last job at Google. This year is the first year that sales have dipped slightly, probably due to COVID and a better competitor for VS Code, but it's still very profitable.
I solely started <a href="https://testimonial.to" rel="nofollow">https://testimonial.to</a> 2 weeks ago, and it generated over $5k revenue for me since its launch. I wouldn't say success, but at least it's my best launch ever.<p>Well, the website is an app to help collect video testimonials for your businesses. I offered a lifetime deal, all my revenue is from the lifetime deal. Now the deal is gone. In 2021, I will be only focus on recurring revenue. Start all over again :)
Also: 9 months ago [0] and a few weeks ago [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652</a>
Lunch Money (<a href="https://lunchmoney.app/" rel="nofollow">https://lunchmoney.app/</a>) is run by one person. It is a personal budgeting app that is very well-designed and easy to use. The founder's journey is also quite interesting as she has been traveling as a digital nomad while building Lunch Money.
I'm running <a href="https://info-beamer.com" rel="nofollow">https://info-beamer.com</a>, a digital signage hosted service using the Raspberry Pi. It started as a for-fun project 8 years ago when I decided to do the digital info system for a local hacker conference and didn't find anything that allows quick prototyping and rapid iteration/live coding of content. I then switch from "desktop Linux" to Raspberries and added a web based service around the fairly low-level command line tool. It's my main source of income for 4 years now.
I run <a href="https://www.checkbot.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.checkbot.io/</a>. :)<p>> Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems.<p>I created it to scratch my own itch while working freelance on other websites. There was one website in particular where minor changes on one page was breaking unrelated pages so a localhost web crawler that checked for issues was invaluable when doing small and large refactors.<p>The guide I wrote that explains all the page factors Checkbot tests for (<a href="https://www.checkbot.io/guide/" rel="nofollow">https://www.checkbot.io/guide/</a>) also helped me brush up on current web best practices. People treat SEO like a scammy word but the general recommendations are good for humans too!
<a href="https://next-episode.net" rel="nofollow">https://next-episode.net</a> is a service I run for more than 15 years now.<p>It's a TV / Movies tracking website/community that helps people organize what they watch and find new shows to watch.<p>I started it for myself (because I couldn't find such tool back in the day) while I was working as a front end developer in an outsourcing company and it slowly grew and became my (only) day job.<p>There is a lot to do in terms of user support and constant maintenance and development (considering also the iOS and Android apps), but I've made the conscious decision to stay a sole developer and not try and hire people to help. For me - I feel this works great even though I realize I may be missing a lot by not trying to scale up by hiring.<p>Hope that makes sense.<p>I'm around if anyone has any questions.
I asked this question back in 2014 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243</a>) hoping to start something myself. It's now 2021 and I still have nothing to show but failed attempts. Looking through the list of businesses from 2014 and a vast majority of them look like they are still active which is great! Thanks for the trip down memory lane. It is tougher to find the time these days with 2 kids, but I am setting myself the goal of $25K from non hour based work this year. Well done to all of you that have succeeded. To all of us dreamers, this could be the year!
Yes, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been very lucrative<p>Basically its great because everything is client side so all you have to is make frontend websites for people to interact with, and even that isn't really necessary. You just need people, with wallets, to be able to interact with your smart contract easily.<p>The smart contract you deploy has to address a pain point for existing users, typically by consolidating multiple transactions they are doing into a single transaction.<p>Your smart contract can take a cut of the transactions that flow through it.<p>The ongoing overhead costs are practically non-existent. The initial costs to deploy your smart contracts can vary to be several hundred dollars at time of writing.<p>It doesn't really matter what people think is happening in the blockchain space, or their infinitely moving goal post to reinforce their view about a lack of use case. The reality is that there is a market and there are market needs, just like any other market. The distinctions in this space is that the payment system is built in and all the users bring their own connection to the nearest servers which store all your variables. It's not different than any other financial services, just way faster and permissionless to get a foothold in.
Beware of the selection bias before making any conclusions.<p>For every person who currently does X successfully, there will be a multiple of those who failed at the (nearly) same and aren't chiming in.
I sell ebooks [0] and currently they are my only source of income (if you don't count savings interest). I started writing books as a last-ditch effort in late 2018. Had left my job in 2014, was living on savings and the occasional workshops I conducted in colleges. I had plenty of material prepared for workshops, so I started converting them to books.<p>First book didn't sell much but initial sales of the second one got me enough to cover about 2 months of expenses. Combined with workshops, books helped me through 2019 and early 2020. (Note that I live alone, in outskirts of a city in India - my monthly living expenses is around $150, which includes rent and domestic help)<p>Pandemic meant I didn't get workshops anymore, but fortunately, my ebooks sale picked up enough to more than cover that loss. I even spent about 5 months to just update my earlier books. Currently working on 9th book that I hope to publish by end of this month.<p>[0] <a href="https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/" rel="nofollow">https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/</a>
I came up with the idea of a hardware startup called AirGradient [1] focusing on indoor air quality monitoring due to annual recurring wildfires in my region and the wish to help my local school here in managing this better.<p>Very soon I realized, I lack the experience on the hardware side and a partner joined in (so strictly not solo anymore). Yes hardware is hard!<p>AirGradient focuses on monitoring indoor air quality in schools and offices and operates with a hardware as a service model, i.e. you do not have upfront costs for buying expensive sensor but you get the sensors provided for the duration of the service.<p>I am also running a blog on AirQuality. I created detailed build instructions to build your own powerful air quality monitor (PM, CO2, Temperature and Humidity) which is fully open source and open hardware and I am more than happy to send you PCBs if you want to build it [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.airgradient.com/schools/" rel="nofollow">https://www.airgradient.com/schools/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.airgradient.com/blog/2020/08/25/the-airgradient-diy-sensor/" rel="nofollow">https://www.airgradient.com/blog/2020/08/25/the-airgradient-...</a>
I've run my own one-man[1] software business selling desktop software for Windows and Mac since 2005. Products with launch date:<p><a href="https://www.perfecttableplan.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.perfecttableplan.com</a> (2005)<p><a href="https://www.hyperplan.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.hyperplan.com</a> (2015)<p><a href="https://www.easydatatransform.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.easydatatransform.com</a> (2019)<p>2020 wasn't a great year due to the effect of COVID on PerfectTablePlan sales. But I've been profitable every year.<p>[1] With a bit of help from my wife on the accounts and freelancers for web design, testing etc.
I sell my own books. I started in 2018. As of 2020, that made about 80 % of my total income.<p>Previous programming experience was useful, I could hack together some WooCommerce plugins that help me take care of the customers (generating invoices, communication with the Czech Post, pairing bank payments to orders and informing me about payments that could not be paired reliably). That saved me a lot of repetitive work.
OptDuty [0] is ramen profitable in my place (like $1k per month) after 4 months from launching. Although it's still side project for me.<p>Everything started from a Show HN post and one comment on HN. Majority of paying clients are from HN too.<p>I started the project in May, and launched in August. And after 2 months I was thinking it's total failure, because target audience is too specific and my marketing skills sucks.<p>But by keep talking to a few early users I finally managed to convince them to use the product and than paid for yearly subscription.<p>[0] <a href="https://optduty.com/" rel="nofollow">https://optduty.com/</a>
I created <a href="https://huntr.co" rel="nofollow">https://huntr.co</a> back in 2017, just reached $15k mrr last month. Looking to hire someone to help with sales in the next few months. It's been fun to work on such a variety of things in the past 3 years (design, development, sales, etc), but I'm ready to grow the team :)
I'll be starting a Youtube channel shortly about solo bootstrapping a tech business around a mobile app and everything that's involved, from idea validation to implementation, launch and marketing. Let me know if that's everything you're interested in
During the pandemic, I launched [link redacted], an open-source tool to check if an email exists, without sending any email. Not sure what "successful" means here, but I have a couple dozens of customers, which for me is a success.
I'm running two businesses:<p>1: <a href="https://postsheet.com" rel="nofollow">https://postsheet.com</a> for sending personalized emails and text messages using Google Sheets and Airtable<p>2: <a href="https://pikaso.me" rel="nofollow">https://pikaso.me</a> for taking beautiful clutter-free Twitter screenshots for sharing on Instagram
<a href="https://hauling.market/" rel="nofollow">https://hauling.market/</a><p>Andrew is killing it. Already over one million in bids on his platform.
I created AuctionGo (<a href="https://auction-go.com" rel="nofollow">https://auction-go.com</a>) about 18 months ago and started getting traction really quickly through Google Ads. It’s white label auction software (like creating a private Ebay of your own). I had envisioned many medium sized businesses in the US would use it to sell commodities or host reverse auctions for suppliers, but all the interest has come from overseas companies selling all kids of things, especially real estate.
A great many people [including myself] have a successful online business flipping which is buying and selling of goods (more used than new). Buying is from local thrift shops, auctions, garage sales, Craiglist, Facebook Marketplace, etc and selling is at Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc. If interested follow the Reddit sub-reddit: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/</a>
I'm able to support myself from my online business now, but it took three years of learning and struggle to get here. This was not time wasted, as I grew a lot.<p>I get a compliment from time to time from my users asking if I'm really running my product solo.<p>The tool is <a href="https://syften.com" rel="nofollow">https://syften.com</a> and it's a keyword notification service for Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Slack communities, Facebook groups etc.<p>I think that the biggest help was the Indie Hackers community.<p>Interestingly, after reading all of Paul Grahams essays and going through startup school I saw no spike in my MRR. On the other hand, reading a handful of James Clear articles had a profound effect. It's important to keep in mind that if what you read doesn't change your behaviour then it's just entertainment.
I am building a feature-rich and highly performant self-hosted analytics platform: <a href="https://www.usertrack.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.usertrack.net</a><p>It is profitable as the running costs are very low, but currently my income is only around $1k-$2k/month. It started as a side-project but I have been working full-time on it since last year when the gaming company I was working for went bankrupt.<p>Being a dev I am too focused on product and I always want to "fix one more thing" before marketing it. As my savings got lower the product got better, I think I am now at that point when I can start finding customers without having to worry that "maybe my product is not good enough".
I write content to help people settle in Germany. They need certain services, and I get a commission when I refer them to those services.<p>I don't think I could trivially reproduce the results, but I'm happy to get paid for offering free advice. I hope it lasts.
I'm building a custom email forwarding services for your domain. Only have 2 customers right now though.<p><a href="https://hanami.run/" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.run/</a><p>Every time I bought a new domain and need to setup DNS or verify email, all I want is to receive email from that domains. But setting up postfix or configuring lambda/ses is a pain. So I build this service.<p>All you have to do is point MX records to my servers and you will be able to receive incoming email.<p>This is the first time I have a side project that almost finished :-) after 10 years wanting to build a SaaS. To me that is a success.
I started Niceboard (<a href="https://niceboard.co" rel="nofollow">https://niceboard.co</a>) last summer and while the recurring revenue is not enough to entirely live on yet, I've been running a lifetime deal on Appsumo which has consistently brought in >$5k / month over the past few months and live off of that (for how long is the million dollar question).<p>Now I have to fully transition from fixed revenue to recurring!<p>(I was thinking of writing a quick note about all of this but idk if anyone cares/is interested)
I run my side project <a href="https://namesmith.io" rel="nofollow">https://namesmith.io</a> for about 5 years now. It is a domain name generator which can also check the domain availability. It is covering the server cost plus a bit extra. About $200 per month.<p>I didn't work on it for about 3 years but I recently decided to give it some love. I still think it has potential.
Not much of a success in terms of providing a large part of my income, but I have launched the SaaS Starter Kit (<a href="https://saasstarterkit.app/" rel="nofollow">https://saasstarterkit.app/</a>) 2 weeks ago for early access and I have managed to get 5 sales already. If I can keep up the traction and improve the product, it will be possible to have it make up a large portion of my current income.<p>So far, I have found the IndieHackers community to be very helpful, they are willing to provide feedback and the first two purchases have already come from there. In addition to that, I joined a conversation on Twitter under a thread Adam Wathan, the creator of TailwindCSS, started and it has generated quite a lot of initial traffic to the project.<p>I haven't launched it fully yet, I am still looking to collect feedback from the early users, so I am offering a large discount, but it feels great to be able to make some money with a side project after a long time working on it.
I run a paid addon for local e-commerce platform(with 25k shops build on it). It all started about 15 month ago when i was still working in a web development company. The platform owners came to us and offered us a partnership. We would develop some new addons for them, run them, and split the profits(80% for us, 20% for them). As i was the one most interested in this i got the first project and developed and supported it for about 9 month. I saw it could have a nice future and bought it from the web development company and quit the job. Now i run it by myself and i love it.<p>The addon provides an easy way to print paper labels for products and other things listed in the shops.
It's not me personally doing it, but a relative is an effective teacher of 2D game development (godot, gamemaker, pixel art), with good pacing, helpful to customers &c (and pleasant to be around). Some examples of his work, which supports their family:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about</a><p><a href="https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-youtube?r_done=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-youtube?r_do...</a>
I created "Mixed CRM" <a href="https://www.mixedcrm.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mixedcrm.com/</a><p>to solve my client's problem: collaborative sales of apartments in realtime. later on, added automation features got generating sales offers/contracts/agreements, then a payment plan editor, and later on added activity tracking and more advanced user management etc ..<p>Pretty successful start, and getting many real estate businesses who would like to give it a try, a few more clients and might become my full time project of 2021.<p>Hit me up if you would like to try a demo.
I started Remote Leaf a year back and it's not yet sustainable yet. It's making $1.5k MRR at this point. One of my goals in 2021 is to grew it to $10k MRR.<p>- Planning to focus more on SEO<p>- Appsumo deal might work
Close Tools [1] is run by one person and they're currently at $40k MRR.<p>[1] <a href="https://jdnoc.com/open/" rel="nofollow">https://jdnoc.com/open/</a>
I had many un-used domains I've purchased over the years (>40) and I wanted to make use of them without having to spend time, so I built Newsy - launched 9 months ago.<p><a href="https://www.newsy.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsy.co</a><p>It turns your un-used domain into a Reddit-like content aggregator with all sorts of features - membership, voting, comments, newsletters and monetization. The best thing for me is that it is completely automated and all of my domains are hosted on the platform. :) Not Ramen-profitable yet, but pushing it to get there.
I built a react-native app <a href="https://skintheory.app" rel="nofollow">https://skintheory.app</a> to help people get rid of their acne in a manegable way.<p>Currently working on an iteration to add affiliate marketing links to skincare products. The amount of money I'm making is comparable to losing my wallet (multiple times).
<a href="https://profunctor.io/" rel="nofollow">https://profunctor.io/</a><p>Job board for developers with cross post to popular Telegram channel. Might come in handy if you hire devs and don't mind to work with people in EU Timezone. Job posting is free of charge.<p>I made some money with ads last year, tho.
During the pandemic I started a side project to support Scrum Teams with their Scrum Retrospective Sessions: <a href="https://www.fraankly.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.fraankly.com</a><p>I am really proud of the amount of monthly active users, but most of them use the free version and hardly any people are willing to pay for it. I am not sure why this is the case, but I think this has potential and I am going to add more features.
Feedback welcome!
I'm running <a href="https://develytica.com" rel="nofollow">https://develytica.com</a> by myself. Its a tool for teams to generate team member skill matrixes by using Github issues and labels.<p>Its one single Golang monorepo and is quite cheap to run because of that. Altough is not providing majority of my income then I hope the % of income its creating will only increase this year:)
I feel like the question is wrong.<p>I used to run a profitable one-person online business. And I felt miserable every time I had to get up at night to fix server issues, or when I had to do customer support from my laptop while I was supposed to be on vacation instead.<p>Now that we're a team, I feel so much better about the whole thing, even though profit margins are slightly lower than before.
I hope it’s not off topic but it seems to show that one person businesses are probably not the way to go for most people- you will have a much more predictable income in a larger organisation and on average you will be better off financially too. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably a VC trying to make you work for them (or fail competing against them)
I am running Accessibility Enabler[0] from last 2 years. It's a solo business . I do take a help of other freelancer when needed<p>[0] <a href="https://hikeorders.com/accessibility/home" rel="nofollow">https://hikeorders.com/accessibility/home</a>
Well, I hope to answer it in 2022, but I'm making Swapiverse. It allows you to trade books you want for books you have.<p><a href="https://www.swapiverse.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.swapiverse.com/</a>