[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2...
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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?
This question was asked 3 years ago
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535) by mdoliwa, and I'm
curious what it looks nowadays. > How many people on hacker news
are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your
business and how did you get started? > Defining successful as a
profitable business which provides the majority of the owners
income.
Author : codesternews
Score : 169 points
Date : 2021-01-02 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Beware of the selection bias before making any conclusions.
|
| 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.
| giarc wrote:
| Correct - I run two Saas apps. One collects COVID symptoms from
| kids attending childcare centres and the other allows users to
| send SMS from Google sheets. I've made a total of $5 from both
| (first customer for SMS tool last month).
|
| I had a lot of interest in the symptom screening tool, but then
| my provincial government changed the rules so child care
| centres didn't need to collect symptoms. I have 2 centres using
| it and I just cover the bills. I've told them they can use it
| for free. Probably more of a hassle to collect the $10/month
| from them.
| tomcam wrote:
| Selection bias, it turns out, is built right into the title of
| the post. Also, a hard-won concept I have learned in business
| is that it's much better to learn from people who were
| successful than from people who weren't (not trying to be arch
| or facetious here).
| cambalache wrote:
| Well, but that is the idea, the selection bias is in the
| question not in the answers. He is not asking what % of one-
| person online business are successful.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Sure, but this renders most of the answers useless.
| Interesting, entertaining, curious, but useless.
| XCSme wrote:
| I am building a feature-rich and highly performant self-hosted
| analytics platform: https://www.usertrack.net
|
| 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.
|
| 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".
| damechen wrote:
| I solely started https://testimonial.to 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.
|
| 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 :)
| yroc92 wrote:
| Simple idea, love it. Well done.
| damechen wrote:
| Thank you! Yes, it's damn simple ;)
| vmception wrote:
| Yes, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been very lucrative
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| Your smart contract can take a cut of the transactions that flow
| through it.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| zenyc wrote:
| Is there a way I can contact you? Interested in learning more.
| LittlePeter wrote:
| So what's your business exactly? Can you be a bit more concrete
| what your smart contracts are, what problem they solve?
| _laiq wrote:
| I would like to know more about the subject. Is there any way I
| can contact you ?
| aantix wrote:
| https://hauling.market/
|
| Andrew is killing it. Already over one million in bids on his
| platform.
| pbrb wrote:
| This is super unique, really cool to see.
| [deleted]
| mg wrote:
| I run https://www.gnod.com
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Extremely great projects!
| codesternews wrote:
| Wow!!, How much money you are making with this? How long it
| took you to build this? How you are marketing this?
|
| Can you please give some advice on marketing.
| m_km wrote:
| Thank you for making it
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Please license gnod to Netflix :)
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Before I clicked through, I assumed the site was named after a
| backwards word.
| 6510 wrote:
| product explorer should ask what device you came from and set
| the minimum spec to match. It can probably pushState all the
| search params into the url so that these beautiful result sets
| can be shared.
| moconnor wrote:
| Tip: for each artist or author you recommend, put their top
| books under the name with the picture from amazon and link
| there with an affiliate account.
|
| An unfamiliar author's name means nothing to me, but I might
| have heard of some of their books. And I'll open tabs to check
| them out later.
|
| For artists I'd love to SEE their pictures. I don't know many
| artist's names!
| quelsolaar wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| Congrats! Sounds really amazing and great to see commercial
| success too!
| leetrout wrote:
| That's really cool.
|
| Do you worry about licensees keeping the code and using it
| without you knowing if they cancel? Or an employee at a
| licensee walking off with the code / binary etc?
|
| We've talked about some of these risks at my current job which
| ships code as our product so curious how other people navigate
| this.
|
| Congrats on the success!
| quelsolaar wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| First of all I sell perpetual licenses. For everything else I
| rely entirely on the honor system. I wont spend my time
| chasing some student who pirates a copy. The real money comes
| from the larger companies and they are terrified of getting
| in legal trouble for breaking any kind of license agreement,
| so they have no reason to screw me over.
|
| I worry a lot more about making things complicated for
| licensees then I do about them taking advantage of me.
| electriclove wrote:
| Love this! I wish more would share your take on this.
| launderthis wrote:
| dude is obviously a fing genius and probably has
| calculated that its more worth his time playing in the
| stock market than tracking down legal cases.
|
| glad to see a software guy use all the modern day tools
| to get out of the rat race. cheers
| boulos wrote:
| Congrats! I've meant to ask you/Brent: what do you think holds
| ptex back in VFX and animation?
|
| (For games, it's clear that ptex is basically a nonstarter,
| since GPU texture mapping hardware can't / won't deal with it)
| quelsolaar wrote:
| Lost of things. Lack of tools is one. Lack of hardware is
| another. Its incredibly useful to use 2D images as resources
| since there are so many tools, file formats and pipelines
| that support it. I have always seen Ptex as "UVs are hard, so
| lets reinvent everything to avoid solving that problem".
| Since I have solved the UV problem, there really isn't a need
| for Ptex.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Isn't this almost a zero sum game?
| newguy1234 wrote:
| Yes. It is a lot harder to do than people make it out to be.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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.
| downandout wrote:
| That sounds awesome. What is the name of the service?
| tomcam wrote:
| eSnipe.com
| dividuum wrote:
| I'm running https://info-beamer.com, 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.
| tallmansixfour wrote:
| Excellent product. I've been testing it out and find very
| useful - especially dual-hdmi support.
| seanwilson wrote:
| I run https://www.checkbot.io/. :)
|
| > 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.
|
| 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.
|
| The guide I wrote that explains all the page factors Checkbot
| tests for (https://www.checkbot.io/guide/) 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!
| electriclove wrote:
| How much has this been bringing in for you?
| lcx3 wrote:
| Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app/) 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.
| jyothepro wrote:
| I wish they also pulled in brokerage account transactions
| makeee wrote:
| Big fan. The founder is worth following:
| https://twitter.com/lunchbag
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I feel like the question is wrong.
|
| 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.
|
| Now that we're a team, I feel so much better about the whole
| thing, even though profit margins are slightly lower than before.
| lightning19 wrote:
| I work for a large ISP as a software dev and still have to wake
| up at 11am to fix server issues, I also got called to fix
| something on Dec 31 while I was on leave. I'd rather be working
| after hours for myself than for my a-hole boss
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| While I don't know your usual sleep schedule, waking up at
| 11am does not sound _too_ bad to me.
| codesternews wrote:
| What is your business can you please elaborate. Its fine. You
| started with 1 person thats great accomplishment to have team.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| I know quite a few people who answer emails on vacation and who
| do on call rotations at their "normal" jobs. So I think part of
| the appeal of these types of questions is that the individual
| gets to reap the benefits of their extraordinary effort instead
| of passing the profit upstream.
| [deleted]
| olegakbarov wrote:
| https://profunctor.io/
|
| 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.
|
| I made some money with ads last year, tho.
| old_borov wrote:
| Kak zhe ia oru s kommenta nizhe
| johnnj wrote:
| OP asked about successful businesses. It is not even a
| business. Something like a pet project idk.
| putin_sodomit wrote:
| Moia koshka nashla tut rabotu, spasibo
| Omavel wrote:
| Not your personal army.
| msangel wrote:
| Another sink where the recruiter will get you... No thanks, I'm
| fine with having a LinkedIn(and never opening it).
| [deleted]
| JustinHaas wrote:
| This website is a complete shit. Especially that "Login"
| button.
| old_borov wrote:
| so make better huh?
| JustinHaas wrote:
| Why I should make it?
| uglyfish wrote:
| Ia js-makaka. 3 goda iskal rabotu poka ne natknulsia na
| okhuennye memy i vakansii ot Profunctor. Seichas voobshche
| pokhui kuda ustroitsia, zaletaiu na sovbes, lid smotrit
| prezritel'no a ia emu srazu memy nasypaiu, okazalsia norm
| shtrikhulia, hr-shu nakhui poslali i ee zp mne na bonus kinuli.
| Vakansii zaebis'. Ot dushi, rekomenduiu.
| makeee wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://divjoy.com
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044
|
| [2] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-
| school-2...
| oceanghost wrote:
| I've been looking for something like this for ages. I have a
| small project I need to do and I'm not really a web developer.
| Muddling through setting all this stuff up for the first time
| would be far more work than the actual website.
|
| How hard would it be for me to integrate with Authorize.net?
| hamza__nouali wrote:
| I also suggest using frontendor.com, it'll help you build a
| beautiful HTML interface for your website by copy-paste.
| makeee wrote:
| I'd say that if you're interesting in learning to code then
| Divjoy may work for you. I try not to over sell it to non-
| devs, but I do have a fair amount of customers who are
| hacking at Divjoy projects while learning to code and are
| very happy with that.
|
| Since all the boilerplate works out of the box you can skip
| over a bunch of stuff (like understanding how auth works
| under the hood), but generally there's some custom logic you
| need to write and you'll want to pickup some JS/React to do
| that.
|
| Any integration with Authorize.net would be totally done by
| you. You could export a codebase with Stripe payments so that
| you can at least see how payments logic ties in with UI.. but
| you'd need to then strip that out and replace with your own
| custom Authorize integration.
| oceanghost wrote:
| Oh, I'm a SW engineer. I just mostly worked in process
| control and consumer electronics. I've done a few websites.
|
| Thank you for the reply. :-)
| makeee wrote:
| Gotcha! Then it shouldn't be too hard to integrate
| Authorize. UI is mostly decoupled from payment logic.
| Always happy to hop on a call if you need some help
| understanding anything in the codebase.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Would be cool if you could add Plausible Analytics!
| makeee wrote:
| I've been meaning to look into that. At the moment I'm using
| this library as the analytics abstraction:
| https://getanalytics.io. I'll see if the Plausible team wants
| to create a plugin or do that myself when I have time.
| codesternews wrote:
| Its amazing! thanks for sharing. Can you please tell from where
| you are getting the users? How you got your first users and
| what you are doing for marketing?
|
| Thanks a lot.
| makeee wrote:
| My first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter
| reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the
| React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay
| Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it
| doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to
| retweet you.
|
| That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP.
|
| Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that
| led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects
| were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point,
| but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of
| feedback.
|
| A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went
| well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day,
| sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to
| turn every new feature into an exciting launch event.
|
| I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful
| of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of
| promoting Divjoy on there.
|
| Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content
| marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a
| learning process for me.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044
|
| [2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4
|
| [3] https://usehooks.com
| daemon001 wrote:
| How do you get visitors to the React Hook blog when you're
| not investing in SEO. Really curious.
| makeee wrote:
| The blog ranks really well without any special effort,
| but for Divjoy I haven't put in the work of setting up
| extra landing pages to rank for different topics. For
| example, I'd like to have a page like
| divjoy.com/nextjs+stripe that emphasizes that stack
| combination.
| khuknows wrote:
| https://pageflows.com has been paying my bills for a couple of
| years now
|
| 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.
|
| https://screenjar.com is also making a small amount of revenue,
| but nothing meaningful yet.
| masa331 wrote:
| Screenjar looks very cool. Great idea! Bookmarking for later
| use
| vinteruggla wrote:
| Brilliant. Are all those screenshots and videos made manually?
| Hard work
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| I created AuctionGo (https://auction-go.com) 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.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| 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
| blowfish721 wrote:
| Definitely!
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| Following!
| gnicholas wrote:
| I bet you could find some interesting guests in this thread.
| I'd be happy to share my experience, for what it's worth --
| feel free to contact through my profile.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| That's a good idea thanks! I'll get in touch
| gabereiser wrote:
| That sounds really interesting.
| akulbe wrote:
| Yes please!!
| failedsides wrote:
| I'd be interested!
| kjakm wrote:
| Could you share the business you've bootstrapped?
| ratsimihah wrote:
| This will be a new business from scratch, built with the
| community. I'm thinking about using a sleep diary app I've
| already mostly built
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I sell my own books. I started in 2018. As of 2020, that made
| about 80 % of my total income.
|
| 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.
| akudha wrote:
| What subjects do you write about? Any place we can look at your
| books?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Mostly popular history.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli.
| ..
|
| Everything so far has only been published in Czech, though.
| akudha wrote:
| I'm surprised that you can live off of history books! Very
| cool.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Believe me, I was surprised too. Very surprised. The
| stereotype of a famished author is pretty strong here :)
|
| Thing is, without middle-men (distributors, bookshops),
| most of the revenue accrues to you directly. Long live
| e-commerce.
| p2detar wrote:
| I can imagine that you have built some sort of strong
| followers community to promote your books? I mean how do
| readers find your books?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I write quite a lot of (commentary) articles on my blog
| and some other Czech portals reprint them. This helped me
| build up a community of readers.
| exdsq wrote:
| I started writing a popular history book a few years ago
| and found it really tough once I actually dug into it!
| Kudos on publishing so many and with such good reviews. Can
| I ask if you have an academic background in history?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I do not. It is just my passion since I learnt to read.
|
| Around the age of 35 I realized that there was a lot of
| interesting and weird stories to share with others and I
| started narrating them in an online magazine published by
| my friend. For example, life and death of Hernando de
| Soto, the unsuccessful conquistador.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto).
|
| People liked the format and actually started to send
| micropayments. It still took several years before I
| actually tried to put together a book. I started a crowd-
| sourcing attempt which, to my (pleasant) surprise
| gathered over 300 per cent of the target sum.
|
| Now I am hooked to the lifestyle :-)
| amaurymartiny wrote:
| During the pandemic, I launched Reacher [0], 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.
|
| [0] https://reacher.email
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'll definitely check this out. This would make it easier to
| move things from LinkedIn messaging (super annoying and low-
| frequency for many people) to email. There used to be a Chrome
| extension that made this possible (Rapportive?), but I think
| they got acquired by LI. Are there other efficient ways of
| doing this? I'm not looking to spam strangers -- just to
| migrate conversations with actual connections off the LI
| platform.
| node-bayarea wrote:
| Very cool! How does this actually check without sending any
| email?
| meowster wrote:
| You can initiate a connection with the mail server, and then
| query it. I read about it years ago, never done it myself
| though.
| dowakin wrote:
| 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.
|
| Everything started from a Show HN post and one comment on HN.
| Majority of paying clients are from HN too.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://optduty.com/
| lemming wrote:
| I develop Cursive - https://cursive-ide.com, 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.
| kohanz wrote:
| Also: 9 months ago [0] and a few weeks ago [1]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652
| codesternews wrote:
| Thanks for adding.
| xchaotic wrote:
| 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)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I've run my own one-man[1] software business selling desktop
| software for Windows and Mac since 2005. Products with launch
| date:
|
| https://www.perfecttableplan.com (2005)
|
| https://www.hyperplan.com (2015)
|
| https://www.easydatatransform.com (2019)
|
| 2020 wasn't a great year due to the effect of COVID on
| PerfectTablePlan sales. But I've been profitable every year.
|
| [1] With a bit of help from my wife on the accounts and
| freelancers for web design, testing etc.
| exdsq wrote:
| Really tiny comment, but I noticed on Perfect Table Plan you
| have an example seating plan for a lodge with peoples names? As
| a member myself I know there are quite a few people who prefer
| to remain anonymous, so not sure if they'd like that image to
| be up (albeit the risk is very very low that they'd be
| identified from a table planning app!).
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Any names you see in seating plans on the PerfectTablePlan
| website are ficticious.
|
| BTW the fact that the seating plan isn't stored on a third
| party server is a selling point for privacy minded
| users/organizations. Particularly when it comes to
| politicians/royalty/celebrities etc.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I run BeeLine Reader, [1] which launched on HN years ago. [2]
|
| 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.
|
| Blackboard recently adopted the BeeLine technology, and there are
| several other large education platforms that are planning to
| adopt in 2021.
|
| 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.
|
| 1: http://www.beelinereader.com
|
| 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
| ISL wrote:
| What makes licensing possible -- do you have a patent?
| Reimplementing by a competitor, at least at first blush, seems
| like it might be feasible?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah, patents. But many licensees are also just happy to have
| use of our JS, and to be able to use the name. The name has
| decent recognition in assistive technology circles and is
| gaining traction in among university students as well.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| What a brilliant idea :) Plus I like the name, it very nicely
| summarizes the product.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Glad you like it! Happy to send HNers a monthlong free pass
| -- I'm nick@[domain].
| andai wrote:
| Homepage looks a bit funky on iPhone SE (2016)
| https://i.imgur.com/QcaZVx8.png
|
| I see this sometimes and then zooming out gives me the full
| view, but it's already zoomed out here.
|
| Great idea btw!
|
| update: Also checked on desktop, the site transfers 8.5MB and
| takes 13 seconds to load (the gradients). (My download speed is
| 7MB/s.)
| gnicholas wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know -- I actually have an old SE lying
| around so will test this and see if we can get it to behave
| better.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| How much do you earn and is the space not saturated already?
| Are you expanding to new niches ?
| nicbou wrote:
| The space isn't saturated, but there is some competition.
| However the quality is often lacking. I maintain a smaller
| set of high quality articles, and keep those updated. I also
| have a more simple, direct writing style, and designed the
| website for readability.
|
| I considered expanding to other places or bringing other
| people on board, but I doubt I could maintain the same level
| of quality. Those articles require far more research and
| domain-specific knowledge than your typical SEO spam.
|
| I'm also not that interested in growing. I want more time,
| not more disposable income. I am sitting on a few decent
| business ideas, and this website could easily grow to cover
| other countries, but I'd rather do more pleasant things.
|
| > How much do you earn
|
| About the same as I did as a developer, though it's hard to
| get a precise number since it varies a lot.
| 0x426577617265 wrote:
| Where do I find your service? I am planning on moving soon.
| nicbou wrote:
| https://allaboutberlin.com - I don't offer any services, only
| free content. However I do have a small network of trusted
| people I work with, if you need extra help.
| masa331 wrote:
| 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.
|
| The addon provides an easy way to print paper labels for products
| and other things listed in the shops.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Can I contact you? I have an overlap in interest ( I'm building
| an e-commerce platform and things are getting real :) )
| masa331 wrote:
| yup, definitely, it's pdonat@seznam.cz
| sideproject wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.newsy.co
|
| 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.
| pythonbase wrote:
| How you got these approved from Adsense? Heard that usually
| have issues with content aggregators claiming such sites do not
| have original content.
| giarc wrote:
| This is pretty cool. I just logged into my namecheap account to
| see if I have any random names that might work. Unfortunately
| all my names are fairly specific and probably don't get any
| organic traffic nor are they well suited for aggregators I'd
| say. Just followed your Twitter account, I'd really love to see
| success stories.
| electriclove wrote:
| Great idea! How much does a typical unused domain make using
| this?
| kewball wrote:
| I asked this question back in 2014
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243) 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!
| stephen_greet wrote:
| Close Tools [1] is run by one person and they're currently at
| $40k MRR.
|
| [1] https://jdnoc.com/open/
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