Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?

I'm the single founder of Bignoggins Productions. I do sports apps for mobile devices. My apps have been pretty successful, reaching as high as #32 overall paid on iPhone and #60 overall paid on iPad. Been full time for about 9 months now. Made 75K last year, and on track for 250K+ this year. Almost all profit as my overhead is insanely low. Currently traveling the world with my wife while working on apps (our travel blog is <a href="http://www.shenventure.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.shenventure.com</a>). In fact, I'm writing this from an airbnb in Venice right now and headed to Milan tommorrow.

I'm a solo founder and have been working on Sifter (<a href="http://sifterapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://sifterapp.com</a>) for going on 4 years now. It's been live for about 3 of those years, and I've been full-time for a little over a year. My salary is about 80% of what I was making working full-time elsewhere, maybe a little lower when you factor in health insurance, but the work is exponentially more fulfilling. I do my best to share my thoughts on the ups and downs on my blog. (<a href="http://garrettdimon.com" rel="nofollow">http://garrettdimon.com</a>)<p>I technically have what some people might consider a co-founder, but he's more of an investor/advisor as I've been the only person that's involved day-to-day.<p>I also created a presentation recently that summarized what the experience has been like and what we've done right or wrong for our situation. (<a href="http://bootstrapping.sifterapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://bootstrapping.sifterapp.com</a>)<p>Finally, I'd also recommend Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard as a good source. He discusses a little bit of his experience on the Pinboard blog. (<a href="http://blog.pinboard.in/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pinboard.in/</a>)

I am the single founder of Electric Function, Inc. (<a href="http://www.electricfunction.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.electricfunction.com</a>). We have a few software products: Hero (<a href="http://www.heroframework.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.heroframework.com</a> - an open source PHP CMS and web app framework built on CodeIgniter), OpenGateway (PHP billing engine for many gateways), Membrr (subscription billing plugin for ExpressionEngine), and EE Donations (donation plugin for ExpressionEngine).<p>I wrote the code, designed the websites, wrote the documentation, and <i>once</i> supported all of the products myself. Some took weeks, others took years (Hero, formerly Caribou CMS), but I'm very happy with where they are at now. We have our niche - e-commerce and recurring billing for small business - and it's been growing well.<p>I humbly consider it a success because, at 23 years old, I've been able to delegate the everyday stuff to a hired developer/support tech, take a nice salary, and do my PhD in Cognitive Psychology!

I'm the sole founder, developer, marketer, and everything-else-guy for <a href="http://www.scribophile.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribophile.com</a> and <a href="http://writerfolio.com" rel="nofollow">http://writerfolio.com</a>.<p>They've funded my travels across the world for the past few years. Right now I'm living in Germany with my German girlfriend whom I met in Australia.<p>Scribophile has since become one of the largest writers communities online, and we're about to have our 100,000th critique written (sometime in the next 5 days if usage numbers stay average). There's been over 35.2 million words of critique written on the site.<p>I'm not making a million bucks and companies aren't knocking down the door in a rush to buy me out, but so far I've managed to pay off my student loans, save a little cash, and not worry too much about where my next rent payment will come from.

Some previous "Ask HN" threads which have details of single founder businesses include :<p>Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487</a><p>Ask HN: Anyone making a living from just 1 app? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772199" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772199</a><p>Ask HN: Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764682" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764682</a>

I'm a solo founder, spend most of my time running <a href="http://www.w3counter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3counter.com</a> and <a href="http://www.w3roi.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3roi.com</a>. I also have a number of other sites I don't routinely talk about because they're competition-sensitive, and some past products that have been successful and sold, like "WP Review Site", a WordPress plugin that earned me over a quarter million in the year and a half I sold it. I started building webapps/services for a living in earnest in 2004 as a college freshman to pay my way through two degrees, finished that last year and bought myself a new car and a new house this year. It's going well, though the poor economy has hurt some of my customers and me by proxy.

I am a single founder and running Indefero <a href="http://www.indefero.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.indefero.net</a> (code hosting, project managemnt) I consider it a success. Maybe not a million user success, but at my level a success as together with my consulting business, I pay myself a good salary since 2008 and enjoy what I am doing.<p>The real question is: what would be a success for you? If you want to do something, when would be the point where you could say: Success! If you can really answer this question, the path to reach this point is not that complicated, but the question is hard to answer and you will change your mind quite often (at least, this was/is my case).

I was one of the first appstore millionaires via my app Trism... I wrote it in my offhours before the appstore launched. Story here -&#62; <a href="http://bit.ly/psyMBf" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/psyMBf</a><p>Lots to say on the subject. Press is disorienting. Friends do change. Noone can tell you what the value of your idea is. Best thing you can do with your time in the spotlight is make good connections and learn the importance of good relationships.

I'm the solo founder of an MMO guild hosting company (5 years and counting as of this past May), which <i>was</i> doing quite well years ago ($90k+/year), but is now much less busy. The site: <a href="http://www.dkpsystem.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dkpsystem.com</a>.<p>Honestly, I blame the fact that I've had almost the opposite mentality as the 37 Signals guys, where I've added most of the features my customers ask for, thus making the system more complicated than it should be. But then again, I feel guilty taking some of those features away were I to do such.<p>That said, it still provides a meager living for limited work (10 hours a month or so) while I work on my up-and-coming projects: Sports league management websites (<a href="http://www.BracketPal.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.BracketPal.com</a>). I'm targeting bar-league volleyball initially. As an avid beach volleyball player, this is my new calling. And it's giving me the ability to work with businesses who won't balk at higher figures (unlike my MMO customers who will balk at anything above $10/mo), and cold-calling, though I still get a little bit of the "sweats" before each call, I end up enjoying the conversation.<p>My results so far are looking very positive for this upcoming spring.

I'm a single founder (Haystack Software). I wrote/write Arq (online backup to S3). I consider it a success because it pays my bills. A huge side benefit is it gets me into conversations with folks who tell me their business pain. I'm working on products to solve those pains as well.<p>I was (and still am) hugely inspired by DHH's presentation at Startup School 08 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY</a>

I started Blogthings.com (a personality quiz site) in 2004 by myself, and I've never had a job while working in it. It makes enough money for both my husband and I to live off of, and we split the work on it, which ends up just being a few hours a week (no more than 10). I spend my free time working on my programming / math and figuring out what's next.

About 3 years ago I wrote an online payroll system (<a href="http://smallpayroll.ca" rel="nofollow">http://smallpayroll.ca</a>) for people that hire a nanny. I have 3 young kids, there was a year where we couldn't get any childcare, and I realized there was a big problem with having to pay the nanny in a compliant manner that I could solve with a web app.<p>The application didn't bring in a whole bunch of money but it caught the eye of some other companies. I recently sold my company to another startup and am working on it full time.<p>"Financial independence" no, but I'm 35, mortgage free, and am working from home at a job that I love. And if things go well there's a bunch more money in it for me.

Single Founder of P212121 (<a href="http://store.p212121.com/" rel="nofollow">http://store.p212121.com/</a>) bringing together great priced scientific research and supplies.<p>Background story: I was a full time PhD student in chemistry and unfortunately our group was running out of funding. I ended up spending weeks searching for deals on the supplies we needed. This process took a long time since there are hundreds companies and literally millions of chemicals. The result was a disturbingly huge spreadsheet comparing all the prices (lucky the process has evolved since).<p>The word spread to other labs and soon had people asking me for the best prices on products they used. This led to the next step of creating a site where people could just buy them based on the list. The sales increased and resulted in being able to attain discounts from manufactures based on volume.

I'll throw my hat into the ring. After a decade of working in the digital agency world, I left a well paying job at an agency in Los Angeles to start my own studio in early 2009. Because I was fortunate enough to have amazing connections I managed to land large projects with UFC, Picnik (now Google), Microsoft, Volcom and others. I was running the studio solo and operating as the creative director while I outsourced various roles. The business was off to a great start financially, but the time required was insane. It was full of 100+ hour weeks and frequent "I know it's Friday, but can you have something ready to show us on Monday?" emails.<p>During a gap in between two client projects in May 2010 I got an email from a designer at Tumblr asking if I would be interested in selling premium themes on their platform. As an experiment I took a few weeks to design, develop and launch a theme. Instantly I realized this would be a great supplement to the client work. After launching the third theme, it hit me that with just a bit more work it could replace all the income from all the client accounts I had. By October 2010 I officially stopped taking on clients and the theme sales revenue surpassed the client services revenue.<p>Officially I opened up shop as Style Hatch - <a href="http://stylehatch.co" rel="nofollow">http://stylehatch.co</a>. Earlier this year I was able to hire my first full-time employee as a director of customer experience, and now I'm looking to hire a designer and developer. As of right now we still only have Tumblr themes for sale, but we're working on a few new platforms to launch for in the next few month.<p>For the first time I was able to truly control the amount of time that I wanted to put into the business, as opposed to being controlled by client schedules. With two young kids I have taken advantage of the success by taking plenty of half-days off to go to swim lessons, head to the beach, or just being there. This summer was also the first time that I was able to take a two week vacation and completely unplug from email and work.

I've been a successful duo-founder (my wife is my business partner) for 3.5 years now. We started in affiliate marketing and have slowly added agency services and now software (we founded a newer company for that with a few business partners).<p>I've been working for myself full-time ever since we started and income is great. The last two years have been well in to the six figures and growth is excellent, allowing us to live comfortably here in San Diego with a great house. However, there are a few pitfalls to the marketing business...<p>Primarily, we found that affiliate marketing, while high-margin in theory, is so extremely competitive and dirty that your entire livelihood hangs by a thread. Google can slap your site, search algorithm changes can sandbox you and unscrupulous affiliates can and will copy your entire site wholesale and use it to compete directly with you. Google, the affiliate networks they use and ISP's will do absolutely nothing (one of the reasons for my ire with all of them as far as SEO/PPC goes) which made us resort to retaining legal counsel to slam people as soon as it crops up.<p>Our entire growth on the affiliate side has been Facebook and Mobile where our margins are often 300-400% as opposed to the slimmer 60-100% margins on AdWords. However, being in such a competitive and bleeding-edge field has meant that our agency clients get the benefit of that experience. We can often muscle a new client into highly a competitive segment and get them profiting quickly; we live the mindset of "if it doesn't make money, don't do it".<p>We ended up making our newer software company with a few co-founders because our overall growth there is better, margins are great, security is better and we have <i>assets</i>. You can't easily sell an affiliate web site, but you can build a software company that is very appealing to sell.<p>It has been a hell of an experience and I'm considering writing a series about it once we release our new app. Hopefully can bring the benefit of our blood/sweat/tears-and-such to the rest of HN :)

I did Etude by myself, which was recently acquired: <a href="http://steinway.com/news/press-releases/steinway-sons-debuts-etude-20-ipad-app-for-learning-and-playing-piano/" rel="nofollow">http://steinway.com/news/press-releases/steinway-sons-debuts...</a>

I'm a single founder who have run Iconfinder.com alone from 2007 until 2011, where I got a new business partner. The site reached 1,7 M monthly visits and gives me almost a full income. I won't define it as success since I haven't reached my goal yet, but I guess it shows you can build a large website alone.

I am the single founder of One Day, One Job <a href="http://www.onedayonejob.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.onedayonejob.com/</a> I'm not quite ready to consider it a success, but it is profitable enough to cover my living expenses. I recently hired some part-timers to help me grow it into something bigger.<p>I did an interview with The Startup Foundry a few months ago that is way too long but does a good job of telling my story: <a href="http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/02/one-day-one-job-how-a-pissed-off-ceo-became-a-startups-biggest-revenue-stream/" rel="nofollow">http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/02/one-day-one-job-how-...</a>

I don't know if apps count in your mind, but Matt Rix's huge success with Trainyard (<a href="http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/" rel="nofollow">http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/</a>) and Andreas Illiger's mega-hit iPhone game Tiny Wings are both good examples of one person doing a soup-to-nuts app (graphics, audio, programming, marketing) and hitting the jackpot with it.

Not a founder, just a dude. But I've built Dayta, Color Stream, Gumroad, and more by myself. Dayta has a few hundred thousand downloads (many paid), as does Color Stream. I made enough in around six months to sustain me for the next 2-3 years. I'm now going full-time with Gumroad.

Single "founder" - just a kid who writes apps, but I've written enough Android apps that I don't have to work a real job as they pay the bills. I could be making a lot more but spend most of my time working on non-profit projects.<p>I'm working on a web 'startup' now that launched about a month ago, but it's not profitable yet, although I'm still moving it past MVP and I've received some good feedback.<p>You should do it. Think of something that you would love to use and make the hell out of it. Passive income _rules_.

You should check out The Micropreneur Academy: <a href="http://www.micropreneur.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.micropreneur.com/</a> Many, many single founders there.

People in Vietnam pay everything by cash. And they love US products. So I integrated my online bookstore w/ Amazon, enabling the Vietnamese to search and buy any book on Amazon in VND (aka the Dong). It is not a lot of money but its very fulfilling seeing my Amazon account and the books people order. Plus it enables me to travel. I m in NYC now but will go to Vietnam in winter. Surf is up in that part of the world :)

There are very many such stories, but most of the people are not very fond of writing (the examples above are people with a lot of written output).<p>If you get to know some of the people personally you will find a lot of successes.

Built, sold, and just reacquired fleaflicker alone. Have ambitious plans to grow. If you're an NYC hacker and want to build and scale a fantasy sports application to take on ESPN, Yahoo, and the NFL, contact me!

My friend Angie created some great products and new life for herself when she started <a href="http://www.byrdandbelle.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.byrdandbelle.com</a> after being laid off in the last economic bump. I agree with Loic - what is your definition of "success" though? Angie and I disscussed that exact topic over lunch this week.

A bit late to the party, but... I'm the single founder behind Jitbit Software (website: <a href="http://www.jitbit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jitbit.com/</a>) tho, I'm in the process of bringing in a co-founder, since it's really getting out of control, I can't live like that any more.<p>I do both web-based apps (bestselling one is "Jitbit Helpdesk") and traditional apps for Windows (bestselling is Macro Recorder), just look at the web-site.<p>I started almost 6 years ago and WORKED REALLY FREAKING HARD, no secret here. I literally had no sleep for weeks. After 3 years I quit my job and went full time. Last year (2010) was $210k in profits. Also, 2010 was the first year I brought in more remote devs and support people since it was getting really hard...<p>We have kids so no continuous travelling for us (every kid needs a home, with his own room, his own bed + teddybear)... But we can choose to live in any place we want (we chose London).

I 've been living off facebook apps since 2008. Upside: life free of commitments. Downside: Too much free time. Right now, i 'm doing a PhD course.

I am a single founder of <a href="http://www.fantasysp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fantasysp.com</a> , a fantasy sports news aggregator. Shows real-time player trends and allows you to sync and manage multiple fantasy teams from ESPN,CBSSports,Yahoo! etc. It is completely bootstrapped with zero outside funding. Relies on advertisements and user subscriptions for money.<p>I cannot live off FantasySP completely, though it certainly more than pays for itself to the tune of a few thousand per month. I currently do have a day job for a startup company. However, this month my site got more pageviews than my day job.<p>So successful? Yes, to some degree but not like the other folks here. There are still mountains to climb.

I'm the single founder of <a href="http://www.supersaas.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.supersaas.com</a>, an appointment scheduling system. Made enough money last year to add an extra floor to my house as an office, so I can still say I work from home. Kids are downstairs with a nanny, so I get to see them whenever I go for coffee. Loving every minute of it. Growth is still exponential, I now have representatives in 6 countries. It's a plain vanilla rails+MySql app, and I had not programmed anything for over a decade before starting on it (I was a CS major in the eighties), investment was just my time since expenses are still negligible.

I'm the solo founder of PrintFriendly.com<p>Two years ago I applied to YC, and was turned down in the interview process. They asked, "how is PrintFriendly going to make a billion dollars"? I'm still trying to answer that (or at least a more modest version of the question).<p>Today PrintFriendly revenue is about $10k/mo, 1.2M visits/mo, and slow but steady growth.<p>I'm happy with the results, delighted actually. However, I'm not travelling the world, or working from a beach. I work hard everyday and reinveste the capital, to try and build a stable/strong/significant organization.

I am a single founder and from 2001 to 2009 I lived and traveled the world 11 months a year thanks to an online accommodation reservation business. Now some 20 people joined me and we are building a new version called <a href="http://www.adormo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.adormo.com/</a> which should let them work online and travel too. I never made big money but I consider it a huge success: my aim was to see the world and I did. If I can help other people do the same it will be a double success :)

I am a founder of <a href="http://pipi818.com" rel="nofollow">http://pipi818.com</a> -- a real-time web picture digging engine -- an entertainment website to help people find out what's the current hottest or controversial pictures/topics within China's "big intranet world". (syn to Chinese twitter - weibo). Selling advertisement seems to be the only profit way(business model). Don't know if anyone has any experience about how to expand the income for this kind of web app

I'm the sole founder of Oxbridge Notes, <a href="http://www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk</a>. I describe my job as "hacker, founder and janitor". I do it all - graphic design, programming, server administration, customer service, seo and online marketing. As someone who doesn't mind working alone and loves learning new disciplines, I couldn't be happier taking on all these roles.<p>I set up the site a year and a half ago out of desperation after a previous project had failed. I asked myself "what do I have that I could sell n times?". The answer: my old notes (revision notes compiled by myself, not lecture handouts) and essays from Oxford law school. I combined my knowledge of law with my knowledge of programming and found a suitable niche. There were many competitors but none of them had the overlap of skills I had, and so I had a huge advantage.<p>Last year the project made ~$25k profit, and this year I hope to reach $50k, with an investment of about five hours per week. (The initial time investment was huge, but it is in maintenance mode now.)<p>I recently began offering notes in other subjects. If you happend to have typed-up revision guides from college, I can offer you a chunky commission on every sale: <a href="http://www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk/sell_notes" rel="nofollow">http://www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk/sell_notes</a><p>For anyone familiar with real time strategy games like Command and Conquer or Starcraft, Oxbridge Notes is the turret guarding my base. It gives me the minimal income I need to survive, giving me the chance to leverage my time by taking on riskier but potentially more rewarding ventures.

I founded and ran <a href="http://serpIQ.com" rel="nofollow">http://serpIQ.com</a> by myself up until about last month, when I added a business partner from previous projects to the company to handle customer service and marketing efforts. It's an SEO Competition Analysis tool built on Rails, it's been a fun project :)<p>Project has been live for about 4 months, and provides me with full time comfortable income and him a decent secondary income for now (he's not full time yet).

I'd phrase it more like "single founder evolving towards success" with my own application, <a href="http://www.simplediagrams.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.simplediagrams.com</a>, which is earning about 2K a month.<p>Like many of you I designed, developed and marketed the app myself. (Although I've just recently hired some help for coding.) Biggest challenge is just to find more time to work on it, since I have other work that takes precedence.<p>Peldi and Rob Walling are big inspirations.

I'm a solo founder at Scribie.com. My first venture was a embedded startup which failed and we closed it down in 2008. I decided to go it solo and released a free Skype recording app called CallGraph. It was based on some of the work I had done in my failed startup. The idea was follow the Freemium model and make money off paid services. One of the services was audio transcription and that took off. In that process I discovered transcription was a big pain and decided to develop a system which takes out as much pain as possible out of it and works reliably. The result is Scribie.com.<p>I've been living off Scribie for the past two years and it's been fun. It pays my bills and I've learnt a hell lot--didn't know anything about web development when I started--and I consider it a success. There's a lot to do still and I hope I'll be able to grow it into a big business some day.

I run a tutoring service <a href="http://graduatetutor.com/" rel="nofollow">http://graduatetutor.com/</a> and am loving it. It aint software or apps so Ive got to manage it more actively. One issue I must admit in a service business is that it is not as easily salable as software or apps.

I don't have anything to add as an example but I want to say I really found this thread inspiring.

i met the guy who wrote the AroundMe iphone app last week. Top 15 overall downloaded app and i think over 30M searches a month. Hes running it all on his own since 2008, just his wife doing support stuff. Very humble and cool guy aswell!

I'm the sole founder of <a href="http://www.fused.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fused.com</a> -- a hosting provider based out of Toronto. Up until recently I managed 100% of my company while on persistent road trips &#38; traveling :)<p>We host ~5,000+ sites at last count, and are quickly working our way towards $1mm per annum. We hit $1mm earned total as of a few months ago.<p>My most recent feat was the birt of my first adorable little gal, and the wife &#38; I are extremely happy to settle down for a few years until she's at a ripe age to show the world. In the meantime we'll make sure we settle somewhere warm :)

Not mine, but a friend of mine, whom I share a similar passion for Photography besides technology, is very happy in life with decent income from his humble solution to backup Flickr Photos.<p>He lives here in Bangalore, India and his monthly income from the sales of his software is very very good. The software itself sells on its own, do not need much maintenance and it just works.<p>Bulkr - <a href="http://clipyourphotos.com/bulkr/" rel="nofollow">http://clipyourphotos.com/bulkr/</a><p>Disclaimer: I'm helping him spread more awareness about his awesome software and if you ever felt the need to buy, it sells for 50% through my website.

I'm a single founder of <a href="http://mmo-mumble.com" rel="nofollow">http://mmo-mumble.com</a>, a voice chat hosting service aimed at MMO gamers. I've been running the service for 2.5 years, and I'm up to about 900 paying customers. It's not a full-time job yet, but it's kept me afloat through other revenue problems, so I consider it a resounding success.

I recently got a very positive review for my new take on to-do:<p><a href="http://lifehacker.com/5835720/folderboy-is-a-simple-folder+based-to+do-manager" rel="nofollow">http://lifehacker.com/5835720/folderboy-is-a-simple-folder+b...</a><p>Not quite success yet, but we (aka "I") have traction. And have built something that people want :).

I'd suggest keynotopia.com. I just re-read the article in the Hacker News Monthly magazine (Startup Stories, which is for free I think). According to the founder it makes him around $5000 - $10000 per month.

One year in, <a href="http://trackjumper.com" rel="nofollow">http://trackjumper.com</a> is doing well. The only downside is that working alone has reduced the speed with which I can improve the project.

I've created 3 apps for the Mac App Store. I'm not too sure if its a success since I'm making about 5k/month in sales and I'm still keeping my day job. I guess its just more disposable income.

my co-founder in my current startup has one. he is an australian and was making 150k/year out of college, but hated it. moved to eastern europe, made a staff management system and makes 1k/month now (like 6-8 months into it), but that is enough to live and travel all around europe and the U.S with a few hours a month of work.

iPhone developer, writing travel guides, starting to branch out into android. Managed to quit my job last year, traveling the world this year. <a href="http://phlogy.com" rel="nofollow">http://phlogy.com</a>.

Founded of StartUpLift[<a href="http://startuplift.com" rel="nofollow">http://startuplift.com</a>] at the beginning of this year. Has been growing slowly but steadily. Revenue around $2k/mo. Recently introduced "Recurring Buzz/Feedback" subscription model that lets companies get featured, introduce their service/product to others and get feedback on a monthly basis. Also planning on adding "Startup/Small Business Deals" so that startups can offer deals to each other.

Vanity fair galore... a very interesting at that though :)

I am a single founder, made around $10 million in pure profits in the last 8 years from relatively few internet projects/products. The interesting thing is i am not even a professional developer (but can write simple scripts and understand technology)