<story><title>Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?</title><text>How many people on hacker news are running successful&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>patio11</author><text>Even if you were to scope it just to software&amp;#x2F;SaaS product companies, there&amp;#x27;s minimally hundreds of these in the world and dozens of them have HN accounts.  Most don&amp;#x27;t post on threads like this, so I feel the need to pipe up and say &amp;quot;This is quite doable, and done, much more than you might expect.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I run a small software company (two, technically).  Products include Bingo Card Creator (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bingocardcreator.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bingocardcreator.com&lt;/a&gt;), Appointment Reminder (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.appointmentreminder.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.appointmentreminder.org&lt;/a&gt;), and occasional offerings for training for other software companies.  I used to do consulting, too, but quit to focus on products.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d describe it as &amp;quot;modestly successful.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#x27;s the sole financial support for my wife and I.  I&amp;#x27;m the only full-time employee of the business (for a very quirky understanding of the words &amp;quot;full-time&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonkester</author><text>To underscore Patrick&amp;#x27;s point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he&amp;#x27;s one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here.&lt;p&gt;That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product&amp;#x27;s PAD files.  There were a few hundred of these businesses represented there just among the regular users.&lt;p&gt;Most of them fly under the radar since, having products that provide a comfortable living with relatively low workload and no need to follow the latest hot technology trends, there&amp;#x27;s little reason your average Dot-Com-Thousandaire would ever stumble across a place like Hacker News.&lt;p&gt;Edit: forgot to plug S3stat (&lt;a href=&quot;http://s3stat.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;s3stat.com&lt;/a&gt;) and Twiddla (&lt;a href=&quot;http://twiddla.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twiddla.com&lt;/a&gt;), my two main revenue generators, and FairTutor (&lt;a href=&quot;http://fairtutor.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fairtutor.com&lt;/a&gt;), hopefully the next one.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?</title><text>How many people on hacker news are running successful&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>patio11</author><text>Even if you were to scope it just to software&amp;#x2F;SaaS product companies, there&amp;#x27;s minimally hundreds of these in the world and dozens of them have HN accounts.  Most don&amp;#x27;t post on threads like this, so I feel the need to pipe up and say &amp;quot;This is quite doable, and done, much more than you might expect.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I run a small software company (two, technically).  Products include Bingo Card Creator (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bingocardcreator.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bingocardcreator.com&lt;/a&gt;), Appointment Reminder (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.appointmentreminder.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.appointmentreminder.org&lt;/a&gt;), and occasional offerings for training for other software companies.  I used to do consulting, too, but quit to focus on products.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d describe it as &amp;quot;modestly successful.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#x27;s the sole financial support for my wife and I.  I&amp;#x27;m the only full-time employee of the business (for a very quirky understanding of the words &amp;quot;full-time&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kewball</author><text>Thanks patio11 and everyone else who has shared their story. I have been consulting for a few years and I plan on moving to a product based income. Built products in the past that have not been successful but hearing stories of others who have done it is motivation to keep trying.</text></comment>