Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019? You can find a lot of articles about the most successful startups / companies in 2019 but these lack information of one-man companies, unless you started as a one person and now you have dozens of employees. My candidate is my friend. He built mobile app that generates revenue around 30 - 50k $ per year. |
Most very successful one person businesses I know of are specialty consulting businesses.
EDIT: It has actually been a bit of a family project, with my wife helping out with voice overs and my son helping out with video production etc.
Another mistake was probably not sticking to a marketing avenue long enough. We would sometimes change our website completely a couple of times a month, so we never really knew what was working or not as we didn't have enough quantitative data. Nowadays we just rarely make sweeping changes, but instead make small tweaks to our marketing and watch analytics for patterns.
I do blog about some of these learnings over at https://devan.codes
As Courtland said, Ben Tossell and Lynne Tye are going great!
I recently interviewed Belle who makes Exist app for iOS with her partner Josh. They make 10k a month and are ones to watch: https://www.nocsdegree.com/self-taught-developer-talks-learn...
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-so...
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...
Eventually he employed his wife to do customer support and now it's been sold for millions and has hundreds of employees.
I used to do maintenance on a fairly popular dating site which was all horrible php spaghetti code, MD5 passwords ... the works. By the time I got to the office at 9AM they'd already received over 1000EUR in payments, every single day. They used really scummy techniques like fake profiles operated by off shore workers.
That's the person behind Miracle Merchant and Card Crawl games.
Last month I earned around $7K and my estimate is I will cross $100K this year.
Lynne Tye of Key Values. She made about $400k in 2019 from a site that connects software engineers with companies that that share their intangible values, e.g. diverse team, good for parents, fast or slow-paced, etc.
Robert James Gabriel of Helperbird. He struggled a lot with dyslexia growing up, and even had a teacher tell him he should give up and drop out of school. Luckily another teacher encouraged him to learn to code, and he's been quite prolific since. Helperbird is a browser extension that helps others with learning disabilities browse the web easier. Robert recently brought on a co-founder, but he'd grown the app to a "comfortable five figures a month" in revenue.
Plenty more on https://www.IndieHackers.com sharing their stories via interviews and on the podcast, and also posting about hitting revenue goals and other milestones here: https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones
RE the execution:
- filters work unintuitively: selecting more filters often increases number of matches
- some filters are very fuzzy, and don't even have detailed description: "Creative + Innovative", "Committed to Personal Growth" or "Bonded by Love for Product"
- you can't negate the filters: e.g. you can select "EQ > IQ", but you can't choose "IQ > EQ", or any value which goes against progressive viewpoint.
I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue.
I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m.
All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my time. It has freed up the rest of my time to keep building similar projects that can both boost and diversify my MRR.
I’m very grateful that I’m able to work on projects I enjoy now, but more importantly it’s given me time to spend with my family and be around for my kid.
Used to be a corporate attorney grinding high billable hours at big firm. Quit to start a solo law practice serving clients working with my favorite thing, cryptocurrencies.
I made $100k working about 30 hours per week from home. Drop off and pick up kids from local school on cargo bike. Take them to the park after school a few days a week (babysitter gets them other days). Client list is kept short to manage stress and avoid need to hire employees.
His SocialBlade profile says he makes between $16,500 - $264,000 a month from his youtube videos alone.
But the bulk of his downloads are going to be from his rss feed, where he has between 2m-20 million downloads per episode with about 4 ads baked into each episode. If he charged a (low) standard of $20 per 1,000 downloads for those ads, this means he makes at least $160,000 per episode. He does like 20 episodes a month. Some believe Joe may be the first podcaster to make a billion dollars. If he hasn't earned that already he will in the next few years.
Let me reiterate. Joe started his podcast himself. By himself. Like as in, he set up his Libsyn account, bought his own mic. Booked his own guests. Then published it all himself. Now he has very minimal help, like 1 or 2 people to help him. It's so insane.
Now you might say "that's not a one-person business". But in this gig economy, not many people are. There's always someone hiring a lawyer, or graphic designer, or podcast producer, to work freelancing gig by gig. So the single person business is usually getting help from others. But there are other podcasters who have also done it all themselves, and are raking it in too.
I like his podcasts a lot, he's a great guy and deserves it all. He did mention once that he made "fuck you money" in his Fear Factor days. His income from that and his stand up tours probably contribute massively to his total net worth.
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...
It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.
What's the difference with say the job queue system of Laravel / Horizon / Redis ? From what I can tell this has all the same features listen on the Sidekiq page except it's free.
What am I missing?
We have large educational clients that are integrating the tech because of its benefit for students (especially those with ADHD and dyslexia). IP licensing is great because it means I don't need to spend time building the integrations myself, and I don't have any costs attached to the licensing deals, so it's pretty much all profit. In 2020 the IP licensing will greatly exceed the B2C revenue, and we may even make the B2C tools free at that point.
1: www.beelinereader.com
My gut reaction is you would not want to position this as IP licensing if selling to schools. We do IP licensing to edtech/education companies, but our school offerings are all software/SaaS. I think schools would find the notion of IP licensing to be a mismatch, which would create friction even if the offering itself is a good fit.
Congrats!!
I’m a mobile app dev consultant that also maintains a few node/docker appliances for industrial IOT clients.
I make enough to dedicate 10 hours a week (sometimes nights and weekends) to build and maintain an electron app that I sell for $50 a license. My software is beginning to compete with other software that costs $500 a license. I have a lot of room to grow, and it’s super unsexy: label printers. I basically created the label design app I wish I had. You can check it out at https://label.live.
Just one issue - can't easily find the price of your app.
You can also go a very long way by using a small portion of your income to pay someone in a cheaper location to code for you. You can literally pay a full time engineer somewhere else if you stop eating lunch + one starbucks out every day, for instance!
It was a lot of work in the beginning, but now I usually have a very nice schedule. Every week I spend around 4 hours researching different topics, 8 hours on updating or creating videos for the platform and 4-8 hours in video meetings with customers or regarding new business opportunities.
This year I made north of €150k (~$167604) and will double that before Q3. Seeing how things are going, most likely I will not be a one man show by the summer due to a need for account management and/or content creation, but it's doable.
She runs her own web/digital marketing company and is the only full-time employee (which includes time for school pick-up/drop-off). She has a few freelancers for graphic design and content writing and I help out as I can while working a full-time corporate job.
Her company revenue is over 300k/year.
For a long time new clients were mostly Google Ads/Remarketing, word-of-mouth and customer referrals and a few ongoing relationships with sales executives in traditional media like TV, radio, etc. Over time organic SEO has come into it as her ranking improved.
There's been minimal networking which is always a concern if online stops working. There's just not the time to be out at business chambers, BNIs, etc, look after kids and get work done. It's also a long term commitment.
My 2018 gross revenue was $600K and 2019 gross revenue will be about $780K.
I'm an extremely efficient developer, a very good salesperson, and I'm an absolute fanatic about delivering high quality work on time.
I don't presume to have any special knowledge but would love to find a way to help other devs/tech people do what I've done.
What I want is some sort of mentor network. Someone who has already succeeded where I haven't, and that I can pester with questions, check I am on the right track, vent, etc, every now and then.
Does such a thing (or something like it) exist?
However, you might get the most mileage from finding a few people who have been successful where you would like to be, and reach out to them for mentorship. Such connections can make a huge difference.
It's been growing steadily for the last 2-3 months. My expectations are that it will generate ~$2,500+ in January and $100k+ in 2020 given the current growth.
I have a massive list of ideas that I will work on next. Yet, I'd like to be fully sustainable (in an expensive city like Sydney) before jumping to the next project/idea.
Also, companies can pay for a featured listing https://www.saashub.com/featured-products
My friend has steady gross revenues of $6M a year. When I first met him about 8 years ago he was 26 and living at home with his parents. He once remarked on how much he appreciated his mother still doing his laundry and cooking for him and his father.
I forgot to mention, he has extremely high gross margins and EBITDA. He does all the work himself other then that admin I mentioned already.
What is his business, you are probably wondering?
He owns internet domains. He flips them like real estate. He looks at Google trends, buys undervalued properties, develops their traffic via SEO, generates affiliate sales revenue, and if given the opportunity, then sells them at a much inflated value. He owns 1000s of domains and has built highly automated systems to efficiently manage them.
It's kind of like parking cars in every $1 spot you can find and then charging people $500 to take that spot.
Also, developing traffic via SEO for 1000s of (parked?) domains most likely involves even dirtier techniques.
Kudos to him, he's achieved more than I ever will but if that was me I couldn't look people in the eye when telling them how I made my millions.
The trick is understanding the trends and having the SEO skills to efficiently build the traffic. He can't put too much individual time into any one property because it will on average only generate a few hundred dollars a month in revenue.
If the trend becomes popular enough someone comes in and buys the domain for their real sippy cup business.
Also very similar post as this one, some good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156
https://medium.com/@PierreAbel/9-years-on-the-app-stores-b58...
We answer all legal questions in 42 minutes (http://www.helplicit.com), and are now expanding that to other domains (http://www.fortyq.com)
The reason I'm writing here is because I'm constantly surprised by the relative ease with which one 'lands' a 100k per year contract, or accidentally makes an API that forks its way to glory. I'm fortunate to know some amazing founders, some of whom are raising millions in VC. Been in and out of accelerators myself. Yet no story I know starts or has ever been like that.
Imho, it is excruciatingly hard work to provide people value and get them to pay for it. Takes time, constant follow-ups, a strong value proposition..none of which gets built jlt.
I wouldn't be fooled by the end result of $ x M ARR. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, which rarely gets spoken of because it sounds just sounds rad to say that I had an idea and somebody just signed me a cheque. No matter the entity at the paying end, people are fundamentally programmed to be uneasy letting go of large sums of money. Takes a lot of convincing to get there.
Having said that, building is an addictive hellride and I wouldn't trade it for anything else :)
Happy to share more of the limited experience I have, feel free to PM. Cheers to building!
Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year.
And yes, he is a one man show, no tech involved. It was very eye opening to me, since my dad can't even boot a PC.
Competition is local though, it's 6-9 other local veterinarians. He seems to be the most successful one (= he is the one everyone sees passing by day and night in the car)
You still need support for all of your users and actual sales. Which is also work.
Users can ask for a refund if your cloud goes down.
I would also rephrase "once you reach success" to "if you reach success"
The statement is also not valid for consultants, only for business owners with SAAS products/licenses.
TLDR; you're statement is largely false. Success != Luck
8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783
I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar things.
The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only use Google AdWords and it runs on a $40/m VPS.
We introduced paid plans a year ago and had a few sign ups. I think the paid accounts are about $440MRR but I split it with a friend who did all the work around paid accounts. (I didn’t think it would be worthwhile, he did, so he did the work around paid subscriptions)
What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you?
Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.
The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved.
I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using.
On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)
some thoughts/questions:
- Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms?
- Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base.
I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a startup in a different domain : ]
I guess I'm just surprised that this niche is worth 7 figures. That's awesome.
UV mapping is a royal pain in the ass and I can't believe it can just be automated away. Many big studios tried - from Houdini to Maxon to large open source projects like Blender. You deserve huge returns, kudos! All the best!
Nit: you need a SSL cert on your website :)
Love was so ahead of it's time, and has been an inspiration since I first found it maybe a decade ago. Happy to see you make a comfortable living in a related space. Cheers!
0. Make sure your house is in financial order. If you are a habitual user of credit cards, have high monthly debt obligations, and no saving, before you even think about going out on your own, change that.
1. Audit your ability to estimate time and hit deadlines. Most developers are rubbish at knowing how long a project will take, even a small one. Make sure you can hit a deadline. This is more important at the outset than your ability to estimate.
2. Start thinking about yourself as a provider of solutions rather than as a developer. You happen to have the superpower of being able to create software, but that's just a tool. Real value is delivered by providing solutions to problems within a business.
I could write pages on each of these points, if you have further questions I'm happy to answer.
Getting your first client, a couple ideas: - Talk to small marketing / ad agencies in your town that won't have internal developers, offering to put some technical muscle behind what they're doing for their clients. - Look for people in your personal network that could benefit from your superpower. Offer to build tools to solve the issues they're dealing with.
These are super generic ideas, I can offer better and more targeted advice if I know a little more about you and your skillset. Hit me up at batmaniac@gmail.com.
What are your sales channels? Is it mostly online (seo, ads, remarketing etc), b2b networking or word-of-mouth referrals?
I work in a niche of sorts, so the sales channel is 100% word-of-mouth referrals.
My champions are executives that tend to move from one company to another every few years and usually bring me in when they've got a new gig. Also, each new company provides the opportunity to build new relationships with new people who themselves move on to new companies, and the cycle continues. :)
Yeah? I was really planning to make a move in this direction in 2020. Another investment opportunity combined with imposter syndrome has put this on hold. Mostly imposter syndrome if I'm honest.
But...I should do this, work to help other devs move out of their employer's house and out on their own. It's as rough and shocking as those first few years outside of mom and dad's but man...if you can make it through the initial bits it's worth it.
I have a one man software business but in creating and selling my own product, which has some strong pros and cons comparatively! I've been toying with the idea of taking on some consulting as well. The pivot to get into consulting seems much harder, however.
The first shift for me was making a mental shift from "I provide widgets for dollars" to "I solve problems, sometimes software is involved". This altered the way I price my services and how I communicate about them to current and prospective clients.
Complex public facing sites for mid-size to large corporations. "Complex" meaning custom-written 3rd party integrations, highly interdependent content structures, and often tricky data migrations from incumbent platforms.
Internal process management tools. But! These tools are just the digital manifestation of a consultation where we do a deep dive into the client's existing processes to optimize and streamline them before we set them in concrete with code. I refuse to wrap software around rubbish processes.
In the beginning I worked my ass off, frequently for next to nothing, just to make connections, deliver quality work, and build experience. When I was getting started in 2003 this meant writing an ecommerce site for my girlfriend's employer, taking gigs on Rent-a-Coder, and doing small jobs for the employers of friends.
The biggest thing has been maintaining relationships with contacts. Stuff like the occasional email to say "hey, what's new with you" or "I'm going to be in your town, let's grab a beer." It's fun to stay in touch with people and be someone that takes an interest in them and their growth. Sometimes this leads to business, but that's just a by-product. The objective is to build good relationships, as cheesy as that sounds.
I'm struggling to find the right way to position this as a service in which the client/user can work, edit, deliver the content or part of it without having commercial ownership over it, e.g. cannot resell my content to 3rd parties.
If I were you, I'd find other companies that are already in the space, see what they offer and how they price/sell, and either mimic them or consider joining forces in some way.
https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon
Horizon is free, crazy something like this could be monetized so successfully.
Imagine if you run a company and have to pay $30k to a recruiter to find someone. And then imagine paying a fraction of that to post all your jobs on Key Values.
The "really analytical" phase wasn't too crazy by HN standards:
- Break the complete project in Pivotal Tracker down to stories no larger than 8 points
- Track the time spent on each story in Harvest
- Use that data to figure out how much time a given point score equated to, along with variance.
- Work to reduce the variance.
I should also say...I've been estimating software for, good god, I haven't done this math lately, 18 fucking years. Do anything repeatedly that long, your instincts become pretty solid.
The issue is that in a competitive market it works both ways as every incoming manager will often have "a friend", so they have to be won over quickly to keep the account.
At the same time, once you reach a certain point, you can become choosy about who you work with. I maintain the client relationships I do because I like the people I work with. If someone new comes in, they're not value focused, they just want to bring in their guy no matter what, well, bummer, but attrition can't be completely avoided.
I think I'm very suited to solve this problem for a few reasons. I used to be a 3D artist so I know what artists want. I'm a C programmers so I can make complex things go fast, and I have done a lot of procedural 3D stuff so I know a lot of mesh processing tricks. The complexity of this is substantial. its currently around 1.5 megs of source code, not counting UIs loaders and savers or any of that. So I would say many long hours and being very focused is key. You can find more of my work at www.quelsolaar.com and @quelsolaar on twitter
At the sametime, I see some contradiction to your philosophy - there is just so much pizzaz in the product you've built. It goes against the grain of what you just said - all those animations, futuristic aesthetic of your product, giant clock with Tron-like fonts, etc...all those things are unnecessary. You could just sell the command line tool, you know :)
I used to think that quality was attention to detail and polishing everything, but now I think its a hump you have to get over. People stand in line for hours, in the rain and cold, and jump through a lot of hoops the stuff they really want. As a creator your goal is to make them want it that much, rather then worrying about the rough edges.
It's just good for business to make the user interface as seamless and friction free as possible to get users the information they need at a glance to make a decision and covert faster = more conversions and more revenue $$$
Zero fucks given.
It's also more scalable than churning out billable hours.
Thank you for the encouragement. I'm giving this serious thought. One of my 2020 goals is currently vaguely defined as "invest into the professional growth of others".
:-)
Anyway, this whole thing confuses the hell out of me. You're receiving 3.6 billion requests per year and you've been serving it all for free with a single adsense ad and only making a couple grand a month off of it? I feel like I don't really understand. Shouldn't the hosting costs for multiple billions of requests be huge? Shouldn't you be charging for that? I'm speaking as someone who's never built anything like this, so I don't really know.
We do have paid accounts now but it doesn’t amount to a ton, around $440MRR.
I hesitated adding paid accounts for a long time because it cost so little to run but the ad revenue was alright.
Lots of niche markets out there, but my at revenue did take a long, slow path over 8 years to get to this point.
I found your project since you previously posted it on HN and linked to it in an answer below (hope you don't mind, I'll remove it if you want).
Pretty cool simple idea.
Thank you for responding.
I had a kindof similar situation long ago, where a friend worked for a high-frequency trading company and I had been developing a low-overhead high-precision resource and system monitoring framework. I would supply him development builds of the agents and a web login to monitor and tune their trading systems while I got some free production testing in return, it seemed fair at the time.
As things matured and I started exploring paths for monetization, when I approached that trading company about a possible contract my "friend" demanded half ownership stake in the business in return for their becoming the first paying customer.
Nope.
I had another opportunity to develop a similar tool for another company, but the person who pitched it wanted 50% despite having nothing to offer other than the idea, so I politely declined.
The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for.
As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? I tried the cold email route (even made a friend this way, we still keep in touch after two years, though we haven't met and probably never will), but I didn't succeed. I probably could have, but it made me so uncomfortable writing to total strangers :(
You need to develop contacts at companies! There are lots of different ways to build your network, but the bottom line is that to be successful with this line of work, which is essentially consulting (at least in the beginning stages), you need to meet people and earn their trust. If you are introverted this will likely feel awkward and uncomfortable (which is why it’s called getting out of your comfort zone).
It takes a fair bit of effort to get someone to the point where they are willing to walk you through their business processes. Showing genuine interest in their operations and asking lots of good questions is key.
Learning to listen is very important, and really understanding what people are saying. Lots of times they aren’t really complaining, they’re just talking about something and if you’re listening closely you can identify potential opportunities in their systems and processes. Often people don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t come at you directly with a problem.
At an old job it was someone’s job to run a “install history report”, it was all the installs that were done the previous week (thousands) and read through it copying and pasting installs from specific cities into an excel sheet. It took about 12 hours a week. He explained this process whole asking a completely different question. I ended up writing a little script that completed this same task in a few seconds. He didn’t even know that was possible, so he didn’t know to ask.
This is an interesting mindset. I don't want to judge you either, but I never understood the value of keeping my money and collecting wealth. If I were struggling, I wouldn't go out of my way to help my family. But if I had extra income, I would help my family if they were in need.
Obviously, if my family doesn't need help, I wouldn't try to give them money. But if they were in need, I wouldn't say that it's not my responsibility to help either. I think this is a simple judgement call. The efficiency of the Scandinavian welfare system is besides the point.
As parent said, he may have the first type, but not the second, so it's hard for him to answer on it without making it sound like a culture clash.
That said, there are a few deadbeats who try to take advantage by always being in need. But only to finance their life of leisure, not real need.
I've given a decent amount to family over the years. For the most part it's about a recognition of what people have done for me. My mother sacrificed significantly so that I could be the person I am today.
Not every country rewards work equivalently. In Sweden I see people working in supermarkets and petrol stations that still have decent lives. Norway is wealthier still.
That's not the case in Britain for the most part - we have much higher income inequality. Someone can work a full time job and still struggle, because the low end jobs pay biscuits.
(This is probably a significant contributor to the sticker shock I have when shopping in Scandinavia - the staff actually get paid...)
If you can repay them somehow and make their lives easier, why not do so?
I wish her pension would cover her real living expenses.
Geography is interesting, but not deterministic.
This is why socialism works in scandinavian countries (it's a need, not a luxury), but fails in the south of europe
It's not an absolute rule for sure, especially over a short period, just look at Korea. However I've found that distance generally plays a very large role in culture, especially if given enough time. Of course it doesn't determine everything. You can find completely different cultures in different blocks in New York city. People don't always see eye-to-eye with their neighbor just some meters away.
In the case of Estonia & Scandinavia the history is rather long and entangled. There are the Vikings, who liked nearby islands - including islands of Estonia that aren't Scandinavia. There have been periods where Estonia was conquered and part of both the Swedish kingdom and the Danish kingdom. Even the Danish flag is attributed to a battle in Estonia. [1]
Would I say that Estonian culture is a copy of Swedish or Danish culture? Definitely not, there are significant differences. There are also big differences between rural and urban areas. There's probably more similarities between Estonian farmers and Swedish farmers than Estonian farmers & Estonian software developers.
At the end of the day, you can't deterministically say anything at all about a group of people, even if it's a small group. Saying something general about people in an area as large as Scandinavia is always going to be probabilistic.
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