Solo founders with profitable businesses, collected stories | Hacker News Reader

Solo founders with profitable businesses, collected stories

blog.kowalczyk.info

129 pointsimartin2k19 comments

I sold my marketing company 2 years ago to start my own single person company. I create niche websites / communities. Comfortable living all from Adsense.

Best decision I ever made was selling the company. I don’t miss it at all.

Sometimes I do a consultancy job (online marketing) on the side, just because I enjoy doing that. Not doing it for the money makes me better at it, because this way I can be “blunt” and it makes me immune to office politics.

I still work 40 hours a week effectively, but I can decide what to work on every day and take time off when I want to. My wife also has a fulltime job so I take the kids to school and pick them up every day. I love doing that.

Are you producing all the content for yourself on the niche sites? Or outsourcing that?

Ever dabble with affiliate stuff?

I'm interested in setting up a few niche/affiliate sites on the side as supplementary income, and have always liked the idea of building and running communities to do so.

Content is mostly produced by the community, but sometimes, if I want a page to rank as high as possible in Google for example, I’ll write a page myself.

I haven’t dabbled with affiliate stuff yet, but will do so next year.

Nice, good strategy.

How'd you solve the problem of cold starting the communities if you don't mind me asking?

I started my main community pre-facebook and pre-myspace.

If I had to start over I would try to form a small offline community first, hear them out and develop it from there.

When you have a great content and your website solves a real problem for people - try to get exposure in magazines and other media related to that niche. People will come.

This is my dream (careerwise). Just quitting the consultancy doing my own products. How do you attract people that will eventually become the community?

Surprised to see the random comment I made surface on this. Dug back out the anon account if anyone has questions or needs encouragement to strike out on their own.

Congratulations on your success!

1. If you're not using electron, what do you use? Are you happy with your choice (can you do what you want to do with reasonably effort)?

2. How did you get started? Did your app start as a side project, or did you go all out from the beginning? Was is spun-off as part of a consulting gig?

3. How did you find your niche? Did you scratch your own itch? Did you look for opportunities? Did you come across an opportunity by chance or through some previous experience/employment?

4. How did you decide that this was an opportunity worth pursuing? That is, how did you decide that your niche might be big enough to support you, and/or that you could compete?

1. Electron but obviously not a decade ago

2. All out. A couple contract jobs until ramen profitable.

3. Scratched own itch

4. Growth kept happening.

any thoughts on SME customers vs consumers?

Not too many average consumers willing to pay $50+ for software. But if you can find something with a reasonable sized market [developer tools] where people are willing to pay, then go for the larger base of users. But the days of average people buying novelty mac apps for meaningful money is over. The low hanging fruit is being given away by the OS or Google or some freemium offering.

Do you do anything to avoid piracy?

Nothing out of the ordinary. I've always looked at it as free advertising. Make sure they need to crack every version and make sure you can shut down a rogue serial number from your activation server.

Reminds me of https://www.indiehackers.com/

If there's anyone in particular from this list that you'd like to see on Indie Hackers, let me know and I'll try to reach out!

A few months ago I wrote a custom web app with data visualization that can run on-top of the old Microsoft Retail Management System. It bypasses the application itself and just taps directly into the SQL Server database.

As I was writing it I tried to make it pretty general/generic so that there was not too much code that was specific to this particular small retail chain.

I wonder how many retail chains will still be using this POS system after end of life?

I wonder if that might be the kind of niche thing that could end up being profitable? Or, would it trap me in a barely profitable situation with just enough customers that I feel like I need to keep it going but not enough to really make a comfortable living?

It always amazes me [wrongly] how much money niche sites/services can make.

If anyone is looking for a good niche, Quickbooks utilities is one. Things like import/export, mass update, Sql access, synchronizing, Paypal integration, etc.

Tools do exist, but they are very clunky and expensive. It's also easy to read user forums and see what's needed, where existing tools fall short, etc. And then market your solutions in the same forums.

I’m pleasantly surprised to have my company included but he spelled Zencastr incorrectly.

Ah well. I guess thats the risk I took going with a weird spelling :P

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