Ask HN: Successful one-person non-SaaS online businesses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Successful one-person non-SaaS online businesses?

63 points_benj26 comments

The question about successful online business has been asked a few times in HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535)

I'm curious about non-SaaS business models because nowadays with all the press that SaaS gets other viable business are not heard about often.

> How many people on hacker news are running successful non-SaaS 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.

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I run a website that helps people settle in Germany [0]. It's monetised through affiliate income, mostly from insurance and banking products. If you move here, you need health insurance and a bank account.

It's not a very demanding job, since most of the content is evergreen. The website could run for months without attention, but I enjoy making the website a little better every day. I love being able to provide so much for free, and still live from it.

In the future, I'd like to hire someone to write more content. There are topics that just aren't interesting to me (like pensions and taxation), and others that I don't have enough exposure to (like studying in Germany). However, I don't trust others to put the same level of attention into the research and the editing.

[0] https://allaboutberlin.com/

Just wanted to comment and say you have some top-quality content. Your information about running a website in Germany[0] was an enlightening read (especially the part about the Impressum)

[0] https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/website-compliance-germany

Can you share a ballpark figure of the kind of income a website like this generates ? Thanks !

It's hard to say because it's been steadily going up this year. It looks like it could match my software developer salary, which is much more than I hoped for.

I am not in your space or even in your continent, but how do you go about participating in bank affiliate programs?

There are established affiliate networks, so you just apply.

I run a site that places bids on eBay the last few seconds of the auction. For each of the last 20 years I have taken home several times the average US household income. I own several real estate properties free and clear, have no debt, and continue adding to a trust to take care of my severely handicapped children after I die.

How does it make money? Do you charge the user a fee, or get an affiliate commission?

If you win, we charge 1% of the final value price. If you don't win, we charge nothing. Therefore all of our technical support is from people who didn't pay ;)

IIRC Plenty of Fish was doing like ~1m/y in ad revenue before the guy started hiring people in 2008. Probably a less viable option now given the ad landscape, but that one always stuck with me as a solo founder success story with a nontraditional path.

The Plenty of Fish story (for those unfamiliar):

https://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-ro...

Circa 2009

"Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. Its traffic is four times that of dating pioneer Match"

"Until 2007, Frind had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers, who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website while Frind handles everything else."

"Frind has set up his company so that doing everything else amounts to doing almost nothing at all. "I usually accomplish everything in the first hour," he says, before pausing for a moment to think this over. "Actually, in the first 10 or 15 minutes."

"Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent."

He didn't add new features?

My site Office Snapshots operated as a one-person business for just about 10 years, though I now have several employees.

It is an office design website I started for fun in 2007 to highlight the offices of interesting companies. At that time it was quite common to start a blog with a single and very niche focus. Over time it has grown into (probably) the largest office design site online and it a household name in that industry.

People on HN generally appreciate that we sell and host our own ads (they can only be static graphics).

SaaS sounds interesting to me, but I'm more motivated by organizing content in interesting and innovative ways.

Still early on (I launched during the pandemic), but my make-at-home dog treat mix business is rapidly heading in the right direction and should hit profitability early next year. That said, that's in large part because it's just me and I'm not paying myself.

I came from enterprise SaaS before this, and on the one hand it's great to be dealing with something tangible. Every time I get the Shopify notification on my phone that I've sold something, it is the greatest feeling that someone has decided to shell out money for something that I created. Of course, the downside is that I have to actually pack and ship something every time that happens... that's the upside of SaaS - build once, sell over and over.

I was already making the treats for my dogs, so I started by getting a designer on 99designs to make the logo and packaging, throwing a Shopify site up and telling people I knew. Thankfully now I'm at the point where I'm starting to manage profitable search ads and I think I'll have profitable Facebook ads soon.

The business is https://coopersdogtreats.com/.

Hey, I remember coming across this before on HN! I don't have a dog, but I liked your site, story, and product. Glad to hear it's going well.

By the way, one significant issue I just noticed: if I visit your site on a phone, the name of the company is not visible anywhere near the top of the page. I see the logo has the company name, but it's tiny and not able to be read.

Thanks for the kind words and the heads up - I'll take a look at that today.

I founded a company that provides AI development services for startups and companies. We have operated for more than 3 years already. I can't say that we earn huge money, but it's enough for a comfortable life and we can do what we like to do (research, deep learning/computer vision/NLP).

I started the business after defending my PhD. The main reason for this was the lack of interesting job opportunities and I didn't consider relocation. That is why the only way to work on interesting projects was remote work in startups.

Anyway, I think it makes sense to experiment with different business models to check the market/diversify the risks. For e.g. we have started the development of a SaaS platform (video analytics) and plan to launch it in the next year. Don't be afraid to experiment.

There are a lot of e-commerce stores running as single person businesses that are pretty much fully automated. Check shopify or Amazon Fulfillment or even merch

You need to check the stories though as there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there

I run an online marketplace selling digital study notes and taking a commission. It's provided most of my income for the past 10 years, often exceeding a developer's salary. I've got a YouTube video where I talk about the MVP and growing it in the early days: https://youtu.be/aKXlZz-wbmg

Your write ups and Vidoes are ahmazing. Working on my own rails app and intend copy paste your SEO techniques literally into my code. With your permission ofcourse

Adam Wathan is a great example. His SaaS was a flop and he's made millions from one-off sales in the past few years.

Check out today's podcast: http://techzinglive.com/page/1704/334-tz-interview-adam-wath...

When i sold my last SaaS (got tired of infrastrucure and customer management) i took some of the money and invested in stock for an online shop.

Its not paying all my bills yet, however i think i am one of the few small fish who actually made profit in this corona chaos without selling faulty masks.

Depends on what you define as SaaS... Looks like a lot of "websites" in the thread below, so I'd throw Pieter Levels in there: https://levels.io/

I'm currently working on two, but unfortunately can't post about them yet. Both are lightweight consumer products manufacturing - decent margins, probably good markets, and the kind of thing that can be spun up in a garage (and run from there, for at least a couple of years) for less than a modest new car. Although I've built SaaS startups in the past, I have no desire to do that again until tools and platforms are good enough to eliminate the need for hiring a dev team. I never want to work with an offshore dev group again. (There are some decent ones in Eastern Europe and Central/South America, but I'm done with crappy Asian software!)

Hate to say it, but if you can identify the right niche, a basic e-commerce store and minimal ad spend is a solid route.

Ok i understand

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