> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
Also, for the curious ones, I asked the same question exactly a year ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072
On the template front: this is exactly the type of resource I wish I had in college while learning and using Latex. Thank you for your contributions! I'm forwarding on to a few academic friends.
It started as a fun side project in university. My friends needed something to block themselves from playing WoW so that they could study.
For three years after graduation, I've continued to work on it in my spare time. In 2015, I decided to see if people would buy the pro version with more features. As it turns out, yes! I was able to quit my job to work on it full time a few years ago.
Not sure if you already know, it can be tricked by setting system clock to a future datetime :)
If they work as made with phones, in my opinion you should say so, and if they don't ... well, I imagine there's money to be found in that market!
I think this means any camera would work, because you just hold the thing in your hand. I almost impulse bought before I realized it doesn't attach to your camera at all.
All in all, very cool product, and congrats on making a living from it!
> 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.
It grew from automating manual audits I was doing for client work. It was especially useful when I was making risky changes and big refactors to large websites where it was hard to predict which pages would break.
All of my products have started as something I wanted for myself, but also realizing that others would likely pay for them too. My first iOS app is now 9 years old but it existed on the Pocket PC and the Palm Pilot years before that.
edit: forgot to add, I do make the majority of my income from these apps. It is possible for small players to make real money on apps - 5 figures for me. A key for me has been to not undercharge. Despite my apps being priced much higher than others, I rarely get complaints about pricing.
Now I've started getting some decent traction (nothing crazy, but numbers keep going the right direction steadily and I just introduced a new product for Black Friday that brought my average purchase up significantly). I've redesigned the site (in hindsight it looked pretty terrible when I first posted it) and am having professional photos taken of the products as we speak.
It's really exciting, and I'm thankful for the bit of early validation I got from HN.
The company is Cooper's Treats, a dog treat business: https://coopersdogtreats.com/
I helped setup CSP at a company back when I was an intern (2013). I learned that CSP can be an unpleasant experience.
A year ago I decided I wanted to do something new with my life so I quit my job and Csper was born. Hopefully it makes CSP easier for other people.
It's not super profitable, but it almost pays my rent, no complaints.
https://www.sideprojectors.com (a marketplace for people to buy and sell side projects)
https://www.newsy.co (a tool to turn your un-used domain into content-aggregator like Reddit)
I launched monetization for both of them early this year and things have been slow but steady - looking forward to developing them more in 2021!
One thing, the Monetize help link doesn't seem to be working. Going to 'https://help.newsy.co/monetize' results in 'A slightl problem, let us check.'
Also, I just set it up for one of my domains, and am getting the same error message: http://news.puppy-snuggles.com/
I googled the error message and found the same thing on other sites such as his one: https://www.vanguardist.com/content/go/787290?
The website is monetized through affiliate links.
Since 2018 I work on it full time and have grown annual revenue triple digits 3 years in a row. In 2020, the company generated an average €56k per month at around 11% profit through 8 webshops in niches in the beauty sector.
I hired some specialist freelancers to improve SEO and SEA but let them go bcs of COVID. 3 weeks ago hired my first “employee” (freelancer 1hr per day) for customer service as I’m finding answering emails very annoying and time consuming.
Hopefully it’ll allow me more time to develop the company further. I have more niches in mind and can always expand into other countries with my current niches (which is not always successful).
The work itself is liberating, though and frustrating. I often flow from feeling alone and incapable to victorious and relaxed, and back.
I personally know few people who own a company and I know no one who owns an e-commerce. Something which makes asking questions or getting help difficult.
Online I often feel overlooked; the startup world focuses a lot on programming and building software. I’m fully aware building your own product ánd a business at the same time is million times harder than what I do. Nevertheless, I’d love to be in contact with people going through similar issues and phases as me.
Not sure the ending of this post totally fits the topic intended, so to finish on a positive note:
Only a small percentage of companies make it to €1M annual rev, a barrier I expect to pass in 2021. Moreover, growing a company brings hard and interesting challenges; eg being a solo entrepreneur I’ll need to let go of my individualistic nature and improve my social and management skills in order to work well with my current and hopefully future employees.
For the curious, one of my shops is https://electricnailfiles.co.uk.
Greetings from Belgium :)
If required, email is on my profile
Funny, in 2017 I had a webshop in craft beers but we shut it down; curious to hear how you solved the VAT and alcohol taxes declarations for shipping abroad.
Contact form is working :-) otherwise you can send a message to the info@ address.
Downloads for optimized binaries and profiler binaries will be requester pay S3 buckets that anyone is free to mirror. It will monetize from re-compilation as a service, and eventually compete with AWS Codebuild to generate faster builds at a fraction of the cost with an interface as simple as yum/apt.
Also some UNIX CLI tooling as a service behind Lambda/Batch where you provide a signed S3 URI to operate on.
Looking for a better payment/auth provider than RapidAPI.
Thanks to everyone for their great feedback here. It’s an inspiration for us all.
I'm currently testing the "made by <my_name>" banner in the bottom-right corner:
I build and run https://onetracker.app. In 2020 it generated about $1-2k/month in revenue from ads and IAP. I started it due to my need for a privacy-respecting and automated service for tracking deliveries. It’s nowhere close to becoming the majority of my income, but it’s been a fun experience developing and running it.
> Defining successful as a profitable business
Ooooh. _That_ kind of successful. Nope, not profitable yet.
Congrats - looks like a lot of work went into it and I hope you find a path to profitability.
Formally, its a "digital operations" agency but I'm experimenting with a newsletter, YouTube videos and selling Notion templates.
Made $55k in 8 months. Idk if that's successful but I'm having a blast.
The majority of sales comes from the AppSumo deal I'm running now.
Just a quick feedback note, under the "free tutorials" section, I scrolled passed the images thinking they were just gifs. Then got to the bottom of the page thinking, "Hmm, It really would have been helpful if he included an example video..." Then scrolled back to the top and through all the content again to see if I missed something. I tried hovering over the "gif" and then realized it was a link to YouTube.
Long story short, I think it would help the reader to have a "play button" or small icon overlayed on the image to indicate that it's a playable video, or (better?) embed the YouTube video directly in that space so the user doesn't have to leave the page.
Hope this helps, but open to feedback if I'm just an outlier. You can try the change in an A/B test, and see if the conversion rate goes up for people who visit the site AND watch an example video.
I’m building Open Source tooling in the DevOps area and custom SaaS platforms for startups. Doing this from germany and making 100% of my income with it.
Used for webhook testing, client demos etc.
Simpler CLI interface compared to ngrok.