I earn about 50% of my income from my business which currently includes https://LaTeXTemplates.com and https://LaTeXTypesetting.com. In the coming months I'll be releasing a product in this space I've been working on for years so I'm pretty excited about that!

Your typesetting website is absolutely gorgeous. I will totally keep it as a reference for beautifully simple websites.

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.

Thank you very much! It's actually just an HTML5 template from a site called pixelarity.com. I have no affiliation with them and I can highly recommend their templates as simple, clean and fast. I'm using that same design for my new product so it's very good to hear you like it.

Cool! I stumbled upon your sites during my search for children's book templates last week. Fortunately for you, the only other template gallery I've found is on Overleaf and it's quite limited, so I'd imagine it's probably great for your typesetting service.

The Overleaf gallery is a grab bag of basically all templates that exist, whereas I try to enforce a consistent commenting style and generally only add high quality templates (at least for recent ones). I launched the site in 2012 while I was at university and was surprised there was no single repository of templates online at all at that point!

While I understood absolutely none of the lower half of your about page, it's always great to see a fellow Aucklander here on HN!

Haha I'm a long time lurker and infrequent commenter, I've yet to see anyone with HN open irl though, even when I worked as a dev for a year.

Pretty cool man!! Do you create all the templates yourself or it’s community driven

Thanks! Most of the templates are existing ones people have made in the past, although I usually clean up the code quite a bit and make some design improvements. The site has been around since 2012 so I end up fixing bugs and making design improvements every few years. The great thing about LaTeX is it's relatively stable with few breaking changes with new releases.

Yup I totally agree. I did came across this site when I was looking for Latex Templates especially for my resume. I am glad I met the founder today

I run Cold Turkey: https://getcoldturkey.com

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.

"Meet your match, Zuckerberg" is one of the best headlines I've read in a long time. You're a very entertaining writer - I can see why you're having success. Great job and I look forward to trying your product!!!

Thank you! I was thinking of switching it to "Your future self will thank you" because a results from a quick poll I did. Now I'm not sure :)

Yea that one is better. A snarky one liner is funny, but doesn't communicate any value to your customers. "Your future self will thank you" is a good way of saying "invest in yourself" I like it much more.

Wow, I like that one even more! Great job!!

Nice idea! You should plan an app version for this

A happy user here, thanks for building it. It enforces discipline on future me.

Hi, another happy user here. I've been using it for about a year now and it has helped me to be more productive.

Not sure if you already know, it can be tricked by setting system clock to a future datetime :)

You can block time changes under Settings > Blocking in version 4 now :)

Oh! I must have overlooked that option in settings. Thanks.

Happy user here too. Well done! I wish you had an iOS version. Cheers.

I love your work Felix. I've been using Cold Turkey for a couple of years now, and it's a pretty irreplaceable tool for people with focus issues.

Thank you for building this. Love it. And thank you again for making it one off purchase.

I love Cold Turkey! The only issues I’ve had with it are when I find little back doors around the blocks and don’t know how to block those. But those are very few and far between.

I Kickstarted Fractal Filters in 2014 and still derive ~90% of my income from it — www.getfractals.com. Amazon's widespread adoption in the US and foreign markets has terrible implications for several industries; but it has really been helpful for my business. This xmas I'm doing the biggest numbers I've ever done which has been fantastic.

I almost bought this just now on impulse as a gift, but I couldn't see anything on your site's product, tutorial, or resource pages about whether I can attach them to an iPhone, which is what the person I'm buying for has.

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'm working very hard on that, thank you so much for the kind feedback. Hearing stuff like this is really what encourages me to keep moving forward. Thank you!!

" The filters are hand held with an ultra-clean, reflective aluminum handle allowing you to position the filter in front of your lens exactly as you'd like. "

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.

Even though the full-size filter would surely work with a phone camera, if you could scale it down to a form factor that clips onto the phone, I can see this selling like hot cakes. Might be one of the rare cases where influencer marketing is really effective too. Is it feasible to grind the glass at a physical scale to make that work?

All in all, very cool product, and congrats on making a living from it!

What I always wonder with selling physical goods is how the process of getting production lines going went. There have been times when I've wanted to sell a physical product, but the lack of experience in that area and relative risk (for financial buy in and mistakes) made me hesitate.

When I started this I was too dumb to know better. It was incredibly difficult and all of the money I raised on Kickstarter went down the drain due to bad suppliers and inexperience. Without the upfront investment of many people, I probably would have been put off; as getting production lines up and running, mold costs, etc. are in the 5 figures. Once you have a bit of a backing though, you can afford to make some investments that may or not pan out. For example the glass I prototype needs molds made just to see if the idea in my head will work, each of which is a few thousand bucks. A lot of times, they don't pan out and the mold is trashed. But when it does work out, it makes up for all of the failures. Happy to answer any specific questions if you want to reach out via email (in profile).

Thanks for this! Just ordered it as a perfect christmas gift for my dad.

Thank you so much I really appreciate it. I just shipped out the order so I hope you get it soon and would love to hear what you think of it. Thank you!

Just ordered a set for a Christmas gift. Awesome product.

BetaList ( https://betalist.com ) turned 10 years old today. For the majority of time it was run by just me, generating $100k/year in revenue on average (earlier years less, later years more). I’ve now delegated all the daily operations to a contractor who spends a few hours a day to keep things going. So technically it’s two people right now, but less than half a FTE total.

Hey I just wanted to say I have been subscribed to BetaList email newsletter for more than a year ago and it has been really inspiring for me to see the products people are building and you guys highlighting those in your platform

Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it!

No Problem man :)

How does it make money? Can't see any pricing on the website. Ads?

BetaList is great! Along with ProductHunt it's how we got our initial user base at Kitemaker. So thanks!

I run https://www.checkbot.io/ :)

> 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.

I run TinyOctopus LLC. I create apps and software for niche markets. 100% a one person gig.

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.

https://TinyOctopus.net

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.

I posted about my new company in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 and got some good feedback and a bunch of orders about six months ago.

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 run an ecommerce business selling board games accessories. It's been way more successful than I thought it was going to end up being.

https://www.burgertokens.com

Love it! I looked into doing something similar years ago. I had also considered selling boxes/redesigned vacuum formed inserts since a lot of board games don't come with them, or they are minimally designed.

I started http://folkd.com a social bookmarking service back in 2006. At the time Mashable called it a decent digg clone ;) I almost moved to the valley in the web2.0 phase to seek funding, but decided to stay in my home country to finish university. For 14 years now the site is providing a solid passive income from ads and freemium accounts as I was doing all of the coding and hosting myself. I moved on to other things for quite a while now, but the site is still going with good traffic and minimal effort. I think it could be much more, but I lack the motivation to rewrite the old PHP base. If someone wants to take over, shoot me an email to bk@folkd.com

I run https://csper.io. It's a web app that simplifies some web security stuff Content Security Policy (CSP).

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.

Is CSP required by any security standard?

Not many mention it, but I would imagine 5 years from now many will.

The copy in the subtitle has an error "the most advance set of ..." should be "the most advanced ..."

Spelling mistake "Under the hood the extension injects ..." in 'How it works' section

Nice website and service. I hope you do very well!

I run SideProjectors and Newsy.

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!

I've just had a look at Newsy and it seems great, really good work. Have put it on a domain I've had knocking around, and am seriously considering putting it on another.

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.'

I noticed the same thing.

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?

We've fixed that link!

One you might like if you haven't seen it already (it is from a couple of years back) is "The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875 (and later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196626 ).

I wish more people wrote up blogposts like these: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/

I help people settle in Berlin and deal with German bureaucracy. I started it a few years ago, and now I live from it. It's a really satisfying job.

https://allaboutberlin.com

This is so neat! Curious how you monetize this? From what I can quickly glean all of the content is free.

Yes, by design. This sort of information should be free.

The website is monetized through affiliate links.

Started my e-commerce business back in 2009 to earn some pocket money while studying and dabbling with entrepreneurship.

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.

I contacted you, but i'm not sure the email form works on the supplied site.

Greetings from Belgium :)

If required, email is on my profile

Hi Nico!

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.

https://redocker.com profile guided recompilations of Linux containers, AWSLinux2 packages, macOS arm64 Homebrew packages, and maybe a PGO WSL2 5.x kernel.

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.

Seems to be down?

I’ve run the foreign-language education app https://pollylingu.al few several years now

Some of these HN pages are gold. This is one of them.

Thanks to everyone for their great feedback here. It’s an inspiration for us all.

Maybe I'm paranoid but even when you're a single person business it's always better to have some warm bodies around you on the About Us page. Especially if you're a B2B. Single person companies automatically require a lot more scrutiny as a supplier in a lot of procurement departments.

I don't hide the fact that mine is a single person B2B SaaS. The scrutiny comes no matter what you put on the about-us page. Enterprise customers will schedule a call and dig from there. You'd have to be incompetent not to!

I'm currently testing the "made by <my_name>" banner in the bottom-right corner:

https://HostedMetrics.com

I built and run https://keygen.sh.

Thanks for the link to last year's. I'm sort of looking forward to seeing who responds this year.

Clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072

By OP’s definition mine is not a successful business, but wanted to share anyway.

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.

https://PhotoStructure.com is just me, and I'm delighted daily by great user feedback.

> Defining successful as a profitable business

Ooooh. _That_ kind of successful. Nope, not profitable yet.

That looks really great. I've built quite a few photo services and the last 2 aimed to fill a similar niche and PhotoStructure looks really impressive.

Congrats - looks like a lot of work went into it and I hope you find a path to profitability.

I've been profitable with this little side project of mine that connects Calendly to Slack

https://www.calenduck.co/

I've been selling pH, ORP, and temperature sensors for MCUs (in practice, most users use it with Raspberry Pi) for a few months. Not enough for a significant income, but fun, and I hope to expand it with the addition of a standalone, multi-sensor device soon. Great experience learning, and communicating with customers, even though the profit isn't there. https://www.anyleaf.org/

I run https://optemization.com.

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.

I make 100% of my income from Bettersheets.co and I'm one-person running it.

The majority of sales comes from the AppSumo deal I'm running now.

Looks cool, thanks for sharing.

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.

Hey you should check out indiehackers too It’s community of people running businesses as one man operation

yes come check out IH. We're friendly!

I’m running https://www.p3r.one

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.

https://expose.sh It's a tool that will expose a local web server to the internet.

Used for webhook testing, client demos etc.

Simpler CLI interface compared to ngrok.

The Polish bookmarking service.

Ptable.com provides most of my earned income. Spent quarantine doing a major redesign. No frameworks or libraries and the full payload, WebGL, property data and all in under 64K.

Is your avoidance of frameworks/libraries based on principle or performance?

Mostly being troubled the value added isn't proportionate to the payload increase. Double my LoC because I don't like typing out "getElementById" or want a throttle/debounce function or two or don't want to deal with hash changes? It seems unjustified if I'm targeting modern browsers.

That mostly makes sense. Would you recommend going towards this route for other developers?

Yes, app publisher. The first version of my biggest app I wrote in 4 hours.

I launched https://forwardemail.net out of beta on Nov 23. Within twelve days had thousands in sales. This is also an open startup at https://forwardemail.net/open-startup.

Geez that's fantastic! Love the startup page trend!

congrats on launching (:

Looks awesome! Was looking for something like this for my website, just signed up for the enhanced protection plan.

Love the open startup page, appreciate companies being open and honest.

impressive traction!! Congratulations! where do u get most of ur customers? did u advertise?

#1 on Google

happy user here! thank you so much for creating this, it has helped me tremendously with communicating with my customers on my Shopify store :)

Hell yeah!

Congrats!

Hacker News[1] is pretty much a one-person (dang) business

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/